tripping like crazy

TRIPPING LIKE CRAZY

MY STORY

GERRY GEORGE .

2009































































copyright gerald a. george 2009
i was a senior in college when i first heard about illegal drugs. i had been using alcohol for my four years there. i drank pretty much every weekend, and sometimes i drank when i had to perform, like read a paper out loud in class or lead a seminar. i would have a drink and then try to disguise my breath. i discovered a mild tranquilizer, something for nerves. you could buy them over the counter at the drugstore, and sometimes i used those with alcohol. i think my father used them as well. then there were the benzedrex inhalers. i used them during hay fever season, and i got high off of them also.

but illegal drugs. i first heard about drugs from a friend. he had been taking mescaline, and while he wasn’t recommending that i try it, he did caution me of the danger if one happened to be latently schizophrenic. there was no reason to think i might be at the time. my friend told me quite a bit about the drug , but the main thing i remember is that he said that it was a lot like dante’s divine comedy which i had been studying, that he rose through rings of light and had a kind of vision of God. i think he also told me that the music he enjoyed most on the mescaline was surprisingly not mozart or bach, but mahler. later i would flash on that as i thought of mahler as sort of like motion picture scores, with great dramatic effects, broadly painted.

then there was jack. jack was doing the mescaline too, and one evening at my friend’s apartment i encountered jack and another friend tripping, although i hardly knew what tripping was. they asked me to drive them around town in my convertible, and they saw people that looked like giraffes; and jack and his friend were laughing hysterically. i would think of that years later when i was tripping, and the people gathered around a fountain at berkeley, eating their lunches, reminded me of frogs, began to look like frogs, as if they had just naturally gravitated to the water.
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i didn’t try the drug at that time; then i moved to california. the next spring a girl friend’s cousin came down from red bluff and moved to san francisco. she ended up living in the haight-ashbury. it was spring of 1967. i paid her rent for a month. one time we were hiking in the berkeley hills, and i told her about getting drunk the night before. she said, “why didn’t you just get high instead?” i didn’t understand what she was saying. sometime soon after that she brought two marijuana cigarettes from the city, and we smoked them with two of our friends. it didn’t do a heck of a lot.

i rarely smoked it after that for quite some time. p.j. came to california, and i was in love with p.j., and she liked to smoke it. we were having an affair. she wanted to try mescaline. i asked another friend to help us, but it never came through. jack came to california at one point and must have had some, but that was before p.j. arrived; and i didn’t think of asking for any. jack had some good smoke, and we smoked with a couple of friends of mine. we got messed up at a party in a barn down the coast where i think the band blue cheer was playing. we tripped in a grocery store in the city, and then one of my friends told me later that that night the characters in the novel he was writing came alive in his head and began to interact. another friend got sort of sick from the experience. she was a psychiatric patient, already taking lots of pills. jack went back to texas and then shortly afterwards p.j. arrived. that summer was a special time. time magazine called it “the summer of love”. i finally had p.j. largely to myself, and it seemed a happiness unlike any had i had ever known. that was the summer i passed my m.a. orals at the university, i had two poems published in the sewanee review, and p.j. and i were planning a trip to mexico together. but those plans fell apart, and p.j. went home to illinois at the end of the summer.

after p.j. returned to texas in the fall she started doing psychedelic drugs with someone there. i was really broken up about it. i later suspected she might have done them with one of my friends in san francisco after i went to texas that summer. i bought a lot of grass from an acquaintance, but it wasn’t very good; and i hardly got high off of it. a girl named chris, the first woman i ever actually made love to in the strictly physical sense, was into mescaline, but not until after our time was over. she was a cousin to the girl who brought the joints from the haight. she and another friend, a former boy friend of hers, gave me some mescaline to take to europe in the spring of 68. i went to europe to get over losing p.j. i had the two capsules rolled up in some socks when i went through british customs, who searched me pretty thoroughly, but didn’t unroll all the socks. i was lucky. i got inside the country with the mescaline.

i met ruth p., who was an art student; and we had an affair in london. i left ruth temporarily to go hitchhiking around great britain. i started out for wales. i had met rick.l. while hitchhiking earlier to bath, and he was a student in cardiff, wales. after a gloomy evening in glouchester and a night in a moated castle turned hostel, i ended up in cardiff where i found rick. we decided to split a capsule of the mescaline. he had already taken some lsd on a previous occasion. we went to a rock dance with a group called “love sound”, i think, that played eddie cochrane’s “summertime blues”. i felt like there was an ocean inside my head, sloshing about, experiencing tides. there was a full moon. we may have gone out for indian food, but that might have been a different night. we sat up in front of a fire making tea in a kettle and just buzzing almost all night. i kept wondering what i was doing in wales. it was only later that i learned that my paternal grandfather’s family (he was an orphan) had probably come from south wales. so oddly i was in the place of my deepest roots. there seemed to be a certain sexual ambiguity between rick l. and myself, but i didn’t approach the subject. i was probably imagining it.

the next day i was still buzzing when i left hitchhiking north. i was picked up by a woman who had been run out of rhodesia by the mau mau, and then by an anglican bishop from tanzania. i went on to aberystwyth and caernarvon before i spent a night on the slopes of mount snowden. then i went to the lake district, and durham and york and east anglia before returning to ruth p. in london. i hid the other tab in the communal bathroom of the flats where ruth p. lived. it disappeared. maybe the rats ate it. maybe someone found it. i don’t know. after that i went to france and then traveled around north africa and europe before i came home to america and ended up back in california in september where i finally took my first lsd. i had lied to p.j. about it and claimed to have taken it a year before; but my serious drug history began in september, 1968, as i prepared to go to the seashore, point reyes national, north of san francisco with sandy m., a roommate who provided the acid; and pam.m., who also lived in the house where i lived and was a student at california college of arts and crafts; and joan b., a young woman from sacramento to whom i was very strongly attracted at the time. joan b. was my companion through most of the trip. i walked into my darkened room and took the hit of acid summarily. the die was cast. the show was on.


gerry george: the first part

i was born on february 1, 1945, at around 11 in the morning. i don’t put much stock in astrology (in fact i put hardly any), but according to my own calculations years later in my hippie period, i am a triple air; that is, i have an aquarius sun, a libra moon and gemini rising, all being air signs. a different calculation done by another astrologer did not exactly confirm this finding.

my mother is the only daughter of sally virginia mancil latimer, the daughter of a mississippi farming family that came to texas in the early 1900’s. mother’s father was frank reginald latimer, the son of a canadian who came to texas in the 1870’s and his wife whose family had settled in the panhandle of texas sometime around that period. mother had at least ten aunts and uncles, counting spouses, on each side.

my father, allen sumner george, jr., was born in 1919 to florence delia sudderth george, an oklahoma native whose parents had migrated from north carolina as pioneers in the then indian territory. she was herself a registered member of the cherokee tribe. dad’s father was born near mount ranier, washington, orphaned at an early age in a logging accident, and raised in newkirk, oklahoma, by an aunt and uncle. he graduated from secondary school at age 15 and taught school in the indian territory. allen, sr. met my grandmother while selling oil field equipment in her hometown of nowata, oklahoma. my grandfather had an older sister, edith; and my grandmother had six brothers and sisters who survived infancy. allen and flo had four children, one of whom died in childhood from sugar diabetes shortly before advent of insulin therapy.

my parents were married in highland park methodist church in dallas, texas, and lived essentially their entire married lives in fort worth. i, like my older brother, frank patrick, was baptized as an infant at highland park methodist as well. i was born at harris methodist hospital in fort worth, and we lived in an apartment on hemphill street at the time.

i don’t remember a great deal about that apartment. when i was three we moved into a rented house in the t.c.u. (texas christian university) neighborhood of south fort worth near bluebonnet circle. we didn’t live there a long time before we moved to an apartment on capps street just off hemphill again. about that time my younger brother glenn was born. then in 1950 my parents bought the house next door to the one we had rented in t.c.u., and we lived there for about nine years. it was a comfortable two bedroom, two bath house, and my brothers and i occupied the back bedroom. that was where i spent most of my childhood, which was a fairly happy time of exploring nature and beginning my formal education.

i attended mrs. edmundson’s nursery school for two years until i was five. i was scheduled to begin school at a roman catholic parochial school my older brother attended, although we were not catholics ourselves; but a series of unfortunate circumstances made that impossible, and in the fall of 1950 i attended kindergarten classes at bluebonnet elementary school not far from our house. i was a somewhat precocious child and anxious to begin my “real” education, so my parents arranged for me to begin the first grade in january at an elementary school in highland park, dallas, where i lived with my grandparents all that spring. at that time highland park still began a new class at mid-term. my grandmother would drive me home for the weekends. that was a very special time, and i especially enjoyed my relationship with capitola bishop, the wonderful black woman who worked for my grandparents and helped look after me.

that summer i attended a fort worth summer school to make up the second half of the first grade, and in the fall of 1951 i began the second grade at bluebonnet elementary, although i was only six years old at the time. my second grade teacher was miss barker, and i was very fond of her. i also conceived a special liking for a young classmate of mine named sandy brown who was memorable in later years from a photo i had of her with a missing tooth. i think i was also missing one at that time.

in the third grade i had mrs. bunnell, a somewhat stricter teacher, but a good one. i remember i got in trouble once for kissing sandy on the cheek in line. it was about that time that the young men in my class began to play impromptu baseball at free recess. i think perhaps that that was when some of my problems began. while i was an excellent student, and already beginning to shine as a star in my class, i was a miserable athlete. i was awkward and poorly coordinated. i did not take to baseball at all. i will have to admit i was somewhat physically afraid of the ball.

it is hard to say why i could not muster the physical courage to overcome this unfortunate situation. i had handled physical recess fairly well up until this time. it may be lodged in the moderately violent situation i encountered at home. my parents fought a lot, and although i forgive him for it now, my older brother was somewhat abusive. for whatever reason, probably my own personal failing, i never did do well in most sports; and by the fourth grade when baseball became compulsory, i was forced into a succession of situations from which i sought to find some form of escape. as often as not i was relegated to right field. i was one of the best students in my class, and that frankly did not help my popularity with the other boys; and my failings as an athlete left me something of an outcast and pariah.

in the fourth grade i had miss goebel whom i loved dearly and often went back to see after i had graduated from elementary school. annette goebel eventually married and moved to colorado, and we last had contact when i was an undergraduate in college.

in the fifth grade i had miss moseley, the art teacher, for home room. miss moseley was somewhat strict also, but a good woman whom i met again many years later when she was the art coordinator for the whole fort worth elementary school program. at that later time she had just recently married. the shining light of our class was jerry layne, whose uncle was a famous professional football player. there were four or five jerry’s in my class at that time which seems a little strange when you consider that we were all born near the end of the second world war when america was fighting the “gerries”. jerry layne is deceased now, but i always felt he was a friend in those days.

concerning the war it is worth mentioning that i would not have been born when i was were it not for the fact that my father was at the last minute rejected for military service in august, 1942, due to a heart murmur, intense asthma and being somewhat underweight. he worked throughout the war at the consolidated airplane factory and served as a civilian air warden. no one would have questioned my father’s patriotism; he was a loyal democrat and in many ways quite conservative; and he survived his young adulthood to have a good career and be fairly robust. his brother served in the pacific in the navy during the war.

in the fifth grade, at one point, jerry layne and another jerry, jerry weinstein, attempted to take me under their wings and help me become a better athlete. we lifted weights and played scrimmage football, but i’m afraid it was all rather for nothing. i didn’t actually take to a sport until the sixth grade when we joined colonial country club, and mother and dad paid for me to take golf lessons.

i had taken swimming lessons at the downtown y.m.c.a and been to y.m.c.a. summer camp, and in general i took to country club sports. later i would take up tennis as well, but i was not a very good golfer. i rarely played more than nine holes, and i played badly enough that when i participated in a city-wide youth tournament, i was placed in the bottom flight which only had two people in it; and i took home a trophy as runner-up in my flight. the golf pro at colonial jokingly referred to me as a trophy hunter. i did swim for the country club team, but even that turned out to be a bit of an embarrassment when i was entered in a breaststroke competition although i was not trained in breaststroke at all. the one tennis tournament i played in went a little better. i took home some kind of a ribbon from that.

in the meantime my academic skills were increasing by leaps and bounds. i edited a school paper at bluebonnet and won our improvised version of the “$64.000 question” which was a popular t.v. program at the time. of course i watched a lot of tv, especially howdy doody and later the mickey mouse club; but i did very well at school and went on to mclean junior high the following year. my father worked for hunter mclean after whose grandfather the school was named.

also beginning in the sixth grade and through the eighth, i took ballroom dancing lessons from james leito, a dance teacher who served a good portion of fort worth’s rapidly growing middle-class society. i wasn’t a great dancer, but by the seventh and eighth grades my classmates and i were having a lot of dances at country clubs and other places. after i had a heartbreaking episode with a slightly younger neighborhood girl, mr. leito suggested i ask out a young woman who came from a family prominent in the insurance industry in which my father also worked. she was a wonderful girl, and we went to many dances together for two years, but finally fell out over the question of romance and dancing a little bit closer for the last dance when mr. leito would turn the lights down somewhat lower. i realized she did not care for me as i did her, and perhaps she could not have at that age, especially since her parents happened to be divorced; and that was rather unusual at that time.

in the eighth grade i began a friendship with two young men that was rewarding but eventually became somewhat troubling. we were all three intellectually advanced and somewhat physically slow or inept. we went to movies and other events together. i was especially close to a young man i’ll call alex his parents were wonderful people who treated me like another child of their own. alex had no brothers or sisters. he and his parents and i took trips to aviaries to look for birds for alex and myself. after i began teaching for james leito in the dancing school in the ninth grade, alex’s family would often pick me up after work and take me to dinner. alex’s mother worked, which was also somewhat unusual; and they ate out in restaurants every night for dinner. alex, our other friend and i were all, i believe, incipiently homoerotic; but we never discussed the question openly. it was barely mentioned in society at the time.

my job at the dancing studio lasted throughout high school. (i eventually went to r. l. paschal high which my father had attended as central high when mr. paschal was principal.) i enjoyed teaching for mr. leito, but it was difficult at times. i liked the other teachers, and we had a lot of fun; but the pressure to conform to the standards of that society were considerable.

i became very interested in science at this time and began collecting lab equipment and chemicals, as did alex and another friend of mine. i had a fairly elaborate lab and on at least two occasions had minor explosions. i also took to math so well that in high school i became president of the school math club and won an award from the texas society of professional engineers, a mahogany and ivory slide rule.

i didn’t do so well in english, but then i was not a big reader at the time. i mostly worked, did my school studies and watched a little tv. we had sold the house on park ridge and moved into a larger home my parents built in a fashionable neighborhood called tanglewood. i had an active social life. partly because of my friendship with a popular fellow student i was picked up by a social group in which i dated throughout high school and had a certain amount of romance in my life which was encouraging; but it did not develop into anything serious. neither alex nor our other friend dated to speak of, and largely for that reason we went in different directions after we got to high school. years later alex and i would resume our friendship, and we still have occasional contact.

after my sophomore year i managed to be excused from physical education and left school early to get ready for work at the dancing studio. i still liked to wander in what was left of the woods, after the tanglewood neighborhood had been built, and spent time with our dog, a black cocker spaniel named sissy. i did my share of yardwork, although dad and i had differences about it. nonetheless i learned a great deal about plants from him and enjoyed collecting cactus and succulents.

when i was 14 my parents put me on a bus for new york where my uncle jack met me, and i spent most of the summer with him and his family in connecticut. this was not my first trip to new york. i had gone with my grandparents on the train when i was four, but i have scant memories of that. then in 1956 dad and mother took us all to connecticut in a station wagon. that was a wonderful trip, as was the summer of 59 when i stayed with jack and his wife maxine and their two children. since a good bit of this narrative will be concerned with alternative experiences, or “tripping”, i will describe these last two trips to new york in detail shortly, along with an account of my trip to california in 1961 when i attended summer science camp at the now university of the pacific in stockton, california.

the trip in 1956 was shortly before my grandfather latimer had a stroke, lived in a somewhat vegetative state for a year in the texas and pacific railroad hospital in marshall, texas, and finally died in 1957. he had been general auditor of the t&p railroad for many years.

my uncle jack had followed his father into the oil field supply business and was working in new york at that time. he and his family lived in norwalk, connecticut. dad was vice-president of american standard life insurance company in fort worth and had recently bought a new red and white ford station wagon. that was how we traveled to new york in the summer of 1956. i don’t remember a lot before memphis where we stayed at a holiday inn that had a large square bathtub. i became fascinated by motels and the tiny bars of soap they stocked. i remember stopping somewhere in tennessee that had a statue of davy crockett, and then i remember taking the incline up lookout mountain in chattanooga. after that we went to murphy, north carolina, where my father’s grandparents had been born. we were able to look up members of his family and had a good visit there. we went to natural bridge, virginia, and monticello, and mount vernon. we toured the nation’s capitol. while we were in connecticut we went to new york and took the cruise around manhatten island and visited the bronx zoo. those are my essential memories of that trip. i have a good bit of this on 8mm movies converted to vcr tape. i was also deeply impressed by the suburban connecticut neighborhood where my uncle’s family lived.

my solo trip to new york in 1959 was somewhat more memorable. the bus broke down outside of nashville, and we had to wait on the grass for a replacement. some neighboring people who were picnicking brought over fried chicken and watermelon for us. i had a good time visiting with people on the bus, one of whom, an elderly gentleman named peter wood, i continued to correspond with for some years. my uncle jack met me in new york, but my luggage was temporarily lost. we took the train to norwalk, and life with jack and maxine was lots of fun.

at one point we took a trip to cape cod and stopped at mystic seaport in mystic, connecticut, which was a converted whaling port turned theme park. we crossed on the nantucket ferry and had a good time at cape cod and especially at provincetown at the tip of the cape. on another occasion maxine took us, their kids and me, to old sturbridge village in southern massachusetts, a re-created new england farming town, and that was interesting. we went into new york a lot and took the boat ride around the island again and visited the empire state building and rockefeller plaza and other places. at the end of the summer i flew home on the airplane, and that was my first flight.

in 1965 i would go to new york alone again, this time to attend columbia university summer school on a ford foundation grant. that was a very eventful summer, but i will write about it later on when i discuss my undergraduate years.

i continued teaching dancing through high school, and dated quite a number of young women, and was active in the order of demolay, a sort of junior level freemasons organization. i attended a couple of demolay conclaves, one in fort worth and one in san antonio. those were both interesting experiences. during the fort worth convention, my older brother, my best friend and i stayed at a downtown hotel and hung out at a beatnik coffee house called the cellar.

in the summer of 1961 i took the train to california, stopping to see the grand canyon along the way. the summer science camp in stockton was very engaging. i won first place in chemistry for my project of investigating the possibility of locating copper mines by analyzing the mineral content of plants, particularly succulents, that grew in the area. in other words i cooked cactus all summer in 110 plus heat. i was exposed to a lot of new thoughts and ideas: existentialism, mormonism, zen buddhism, atheism, birth control, etc. in that environment.

over the fourth of july some of the students and i went to spend the weekend in san francisco where we rented bicycles and saw most of the sights as tourists, which in some ways was the most magical of my times in san francisco, even given the wonderful years i would spend there later. i fell in love with the city at that time. after summer camp i took the bus to yosemite where i spent two days hiking in the mountains and around the valley floor and then went on to san diego where i visited my father’s aunt, edith robb, who took me to disneyland, marineland of the pacific, knotts’ berry farm, the laguna beach art festival and tia juana for the jai alai games. it was a wonderful time, and i liked san diego, especially balboa park and the zoo. i flew home on that occasion also.

in high school i excelled academically and was eventually admitted to rice university for the fall of 1962. i won an air force electronics award at the science fair that year. i also scored unusually high on the english composition achievement test of the college entrance exams which gave some hint of the direction i would eventually take in college. i spent a good bit of the summer camped out at benbrook lake and attended a nuclear science symposium at the university of texas in austin with a friend who also went to rice in the fall.

i should say something here about my spiritual development. i had attended the methodist church and sunday school until i was fourteen. at that time i became somewhat disillusioned with what i perceived as a lack of serious spiritual life in that denomination, and my mother and i converted to the episcopal church. my brothers and father followed suit, and my older brother eventually became an episcopal priest. we were all three altar boys, or acolytes; and our parents were very active in the church. in college i became agnostic, later turned vaguely mystic and buddhist, and eventually returned to the episcopal church after a brief spell as a roman catholic. i am at least nominally episcopalian today. (note:2013. i have now returned to the roman catholic faith. i was unable to accommodate some of the changes in the episcopal church, having become a cultural, political and theological conservative, not to mention that fact that i had already committed to the catholic church decades before.)


the house on park ridge

the sagging arbor
beside the mulberry tree
is covered with wisteria.
mr. harris, who lives in the little
apartment beside the house,
parks his car under the arbor.
eventually the arbor will
start to fall, and dad and i
will take it down, exhausting
ourselves in a single day.

from my perch in the mulberry tree
i am fascinated by the wisteria blossoms.
they make me think of smoking grapevine,
wild mustang grapevine,
that grows on country fences.
some of the older boys did that.
the fruit of the mulberry is wormy,
but i eat some of them anyway.
i take the shiny leaves to school
to feed to the silk worms.
the fruit falls and stains
the black asphalt pavement,
like the stain in the street where
the black cocker spaniel got run over,
(the first of two black cockers we owned).
the mulberry stain attracts flies.
the wisteria is full of bees.

i spent a lot of time in that tree,
after school, dragging a board up
after me so i would have
a place to sit. i could get
so high up in the branches
no one could get close to me,
especially not my older brother.
mother would call up to me,
and i would have to come down.

then there was the time i threw
a pair of grass shears over my head
and they came down behind me
and stabbed my heel.

another time when i was home from college
mother and dad and i were waiting in line
to go to a movie,
and i was backed up to the corner,
when a truck came up and over the corner
and ran over my heel. the movie was
a patch of blue and p. j. had
decided not to come home with me
to visit at that time.

near the mulberry tree was a young pecan;
its leaves were bright and yellow green.
once an asp fell out of those leaves
and stung my wrist.
my arm ached so bad i wished
it would fall off.
mother put me to bed, like the time dad
beat me all over the house
because of a simple
misunderstanding.
he was always sorry afterward.
it only happened maybe twice.

behind mr. harris’s house
was a trumpet vine and some morning glories.
there was a small tool closet
and the dog house,
the inside of which i papered with
old wallpaper i found in the closet.
the goat we raised for about a year
used to get on the roof of the dog house.
sissy the dog would chase pretty boy, the duck,
until we had to get rid of pretty boy.
we took him down to the duck pond,
but i don’t think he ever mixed with
the other ducks. i think
he thought he was a cocker spaniel.

there were peach trees along the backyard fence,
but the peaches weren’t very good.
the amber sap of the trees gathered in beads
on the bark and was sticky.
one time i stole a peach from a neighbor’s tree
and hid it in the bushes. later
mother made me go get it and apologize.

the acorns had little caps
like the burrs on a burr oak

i collected nandina berries,
brown, and dark red

the hunter-gatherer instinct runs deep,
spearing crawdads in shallow creeks,
catching horny toads
and scooping june bugs out of the gutters.

so much went on in that house it would
take a large book to tell it all.
the house itself is for rent now.
just wish i could go and live there.
it’s right off bluebonnet circle.
i’ve been writing about it for 43 years,
since about the time john kennedy was shot.
he was 43 at the time, if i remember correctly.

there was a drug store on the circle
with a soda fountain.
i used to stop there on my way home
and order a hostess snowball which they
would serve frozen with a candle on it.
that was where we used to buy
our oil of cinnamon in which we soaked
toothpicks to make them hot,
and that was where i bought the
potassium permanganate and glycerin
that would self-ignite by the curb.
later i made a bomb that went off in my hand
and splattered purple crystals
all over the living room wall which had
oriental wallpaper with women
carrying buckets with yokes.

a redbud tree shaded the path
that led next door to the haydens.
we had lived there once ourselves,
as had my father’s parents.
that house was actually on cockrell
where it split from park ridge.
that was where taffy the blond cocker
bit me in the mouth, and dad
tied her out back and whipped her.
that was also where she had her pups,
and i thought they came out from under her leg;
and the vet came and cut off their tails,
and the blood and severed tails littered the newspaper.

ed hayden was in real estate, i think,
and had these long blue office papers
we used to line the parakeet’s cage,
admiral byrd, an ice blue singer,
who swung from a hook in our bedroom.

i remember the hayden boys, bruce and doug,
who were older even than my older brother,
and the wetzel brothers older still
across the street, washing their cars.

after the haydens the willises came,
and on the other side of them was mrs. conrad,
who liked to play board games,
and who had a stroke
and asked eleanor hayden for a piece of dry toast
the morning before she died.

and mr. hendersen whose front screen we soaped
one halloween, and we had to clean it;
and his son found me that time in the vacant lot
when i fell on a broken bottle and thought
the blood was cherry juice before i
tasted it and passed out
and had to have eleven stitches.

dr. c. o. terrell’s office was fuzzy with
nursery rhyme posters on the wall.

the mulberry tree is gone today
but the little pecan is flourishing


chapter two (berkeley, 1968)

on the way to point reyes, the night i took my first acid, joan and i were making out fairly heavily in the back seat when i first felt the effects of the drug begin. it was very electric. i began reciting my first book of poems, all of which i knew by heart at the time, along with a lot of bob dylan lyrics, almost none of which i remember now. they went off like fireworks in my brain as i recited them.

when we got to the beach, the great, rolling sweep of ocean and dunes, joan and i went down close to the water. keep in mind that i was the only one of the four of us, including sandy and pam, on acid. sandy had provided the acid, and it was in his house that pam and i lived. joan was my companion. i described to her what was happening.
i turned to look at the sand dunes in the night. i don’t think the moon was up yet. the line of the dunes began to glow with a green electric light, and then began to dance up and down in long sine waves. as from a great distance, i saw a pinpoint of light coming towards me. i witnessed the discovery of fire. figures danced around a campfire, almost demonic. finally i realized i was looking at sandy and pam who had just built a fire.

joan and i went up by the fire. sandy was reciting a bob dylan lyric: “abraham said, God, where you want this killing done? God said, out on highway sixty-one”. i became paranoid. i thought i was going to be sacrificed. i went back out into the darkness so i could see what was really happening. gradually i calmed down. i sat around the fire and watched glowing cities like sodom and gomorrah collapse into themselves, a lot like in a robert duncan poem...robert, the gay san francisco poet i had studied at berkeley. at one point sandy said something about an ocher cat that brought two separate lines of my poetry miraculously together, and i thought i saw a giant yellow cat in the sky over the ocean. i don’t remember much about the rest of the night. as dawn approached sandy stood on top of the dunes and seemed to make the sun rise like the little boy in the movie black orpheus..
.
we rode back to berkeley, and i slept on a large pillow in the living room. that was the end of it. it wasn’t that much. it was interesting, but i wasn’t terribly disoriented.

my next trip was a few weeks later. it was a doozy. i had gone with a girl friend, chris, to a poetry reading on solano avenue. the poet and i were friends at the time. chris and i were on my motorcycle. at the end of the reading, i took a hit of acid, and then the poet came up and invited us to a party in oakland. i said ok and chris and i stopped by sandy’s house; and i went in to get her a hit of mescaline out of the refrigerator. i didn’t tell sandy i was with chris. they had been together at an earlier time, and he might have been jealous.

chris and i went to the party, a small one, in an upstairs flat near the oakland line. i was sitting in a chair when i noticed a mayan print on the wall next to me come alive, crawling with ants in circulatory patterns around the image. for the first time i really knew what acid and insanity were like. i had studied abnormal psychology as an undergraduate. it was terrifying. posters of laurel and hardy began laughing at me.

the party was a sort of jam session.. there were two principle musicians, a guitar player and a saxaphone. one of the musicians eventually became a famous author. it was sort of like a seance. they would put well-known english poetic lyrics to rock and roll and turn them into parodies. nothing was serious anymore. everything was a bad joke. i thought i had died and gone to hell. i thought i was permanently separated from my family, and my parents in particular. the writers present had shared in a published journal called “r.c. lion”, and they sang sea lion songs, often parodies of the beatles and others, such as “kelp”. could these have been hidden references to the sirens of odysseus?

at some point they referred to themselves as “the honky tonk angel review” and indicated they only got together every thousand years or so. they had a jazz choreography and a banter like a radio show, and would summon spirits like shakespeare, the maharishi, and woody guthrie to appear on the show. they played “the duke of earl”, and years later the famous writer would write a story, “the duke of earl’s court”, that i found in the fort worth public library. they parodied wordsworth and ezra pound. all of my serious interests seemed trivialized.

i wandered into the bathroom where there was a parody of my efforts to write fiction in paris, france, earlier that year. the shitty little hotel room with pigeon droppings. it was all tacked up on the wall. i walked into the kitchen. there was a large banner that read “columbia records welcomes you” and listed my favorite rock groups, bands i had idolized; and i thought i had died and gone to rock and roll hell. rock hell. i looked out the back door at berkeley in the fog and felt lost, agitated and alone.

then suddenly it was all over. i thought it would go on for eternity, and that i would eventually learn the lyrics and get used to it; but we were shaking hands and saying good night; and they made some joke about mgm and mr. mayer, and contracts remaining to be signed. the poet gave chris and me a ride home to her apartment. i was in no shape to drive, especially not a motorcycle.

we tripped around chris’s apartment for a while. i played with her cat, peter. she took a bath. we went to a drive-in on shattuck. the headline on the newspaper was about lyndon johnson and the war. i knew i was still in hell. pictures of the ice cream concoctions on the menu made me nauseous.

finally it was dawn, and i walked across the campus, stopping in the eucalyptus grove and then walking out telegraph avenue i discovered that a new store of occult books had opened in the back of moe’s used books store, (it was an early version of shambala books), and i bought a copy of the egyptian book of the dead. when i got home, pam was cooking tongue in the kitchen, and i told her, “i’ll never do that again,” but i did.

sometime later, weeks or days, i came home and found pam and joan tripping on acid. it was their first time. i got a hit of mescaline and joined them. we sat around the living room looking at art and rapping. pam was molding clay, and i saw a form of the elephant headed hindu god ganesha pass through her hands. joan was drawing in the kitchen, something with the virgin mary. joan was roman catholic
.
i felt like we were santa’s elves and getting ready for christmas. it was very ecstatic and enjoyable. sandy came in, but he wasn’t on our wave length and became irritable. he played the mamas and the papas on the stereo. i told joan my theory about “first” parents (adam and eve) and hearing them cry at night for our loss.

the night passed and joan fell asleep for a while. she was in brown, like buckskin. pam and i got ready to leave in the early morning hours to go to the renaissance pleasure fair in marin country. we thought of ourselves as incarnations of greek deities. she was demeter, i was hermes, and joan was artemis, goddess of the hunt.

this theory was later confirmed by a book i had on the twelve major olympians. it told how hermes loved a wood nymph named americus who later became penelope, the wife of odysseus, and somehow the mother of pan. it was all very confused. i was still in love with penny j., another penelope, whom i mentioned in the earlier segment.

we woke joan, and i drove her parents’ international harvester across the san raphael bridge to the marin county civic center, frank lloyd wright’s great beehive of a building. we went inside and tripped around and met the doorman named aristotle who was commenting on jackie kennedy’s having just married aristotle onassis, whose ships he, the doorman, used to service when they carried hamm’s beer from the san francisco brewery.

i was convinced the beatles were going to rendezvous with us at the festival and take us away, and therefore i threw the keys to the truck in the bushes. joan immediately retrieved them. we drove down to the fair site (we were all in strange costumes... pam with beaded angel wings and i was in a full length leather flight suit) and entered through the back of the fair largely unnoticed. we ran into one of our neighbors, desdemona, who lived at the house of the four winds.

we climbed a hill and fell asleep briefly on the ground, curled up as if in a womb, like bruegel’s “land of cockaigne” or el greco’s “agony in the garden”. after that we were escorted out of the festival.

we drove back to berkeley and just pulled into the gas station when we ran out of fuel. back at the house we slept on pillows in the living room. joan drove back to sacramento to go to mass. it had been a kind of paradise. i thought it might be the end of all that; but, of course, it wasn’t.
.
oddly enough, during this session i had begun to believe in God again. i had been agnostic for some time. i saw God and christianity reflected in the great tradition of western art, and i identified with a small figure in one of the panels of matthias grunewald’s “issenheim altarpiece”...a man in a broad brimmed hat gesturing toward what appeared to be a large monastery. i was heavily into that painting that night, as well as albrecht altdorfer’s magnficent painting of the battle of alexander and darius, which battle is referenced in first maccabees.


another childhood interlude

when i was a child, growing up on bluebonnet circle, there was a small mountain of concrete blocks and rubble that was piled up just south of the circle in the area now bordered by south university drive and park ridge. adjacent to the stone mountain was a deep gully that contained a shallow creek that was fed by a large storm sewer. along the walls of the gully was a thick red clay that could be made into primitive pottery. crawdads and tadpoles lived in the creek, and we would catch the tadpoles with small fishing nets, and the crawdads we speared with nails attached to poles. we would turn over rocks looking for them. there was no particular reason for this carnage; we certainly never thought of eating them...they were too small. it was just a primitive urge to hunt that drove us to kill or capture whatever we could in the little wilderness that abounded along that lonely creek which watered a various marshland that had a jungle of cane in which there were paths we would explore, lost in that juvenile world of adventure that doesn’t require such a large territory.

the mountain itself had crevices where one could hide and from which one could defend oneself against attack. there were rusty pipes and pieces of metal sticking out of the concrete boulders. i would often climb up to a favorite spot and watch for hours as different children i knew would come and go at the mouth of the creek. the somewhat artificial eden was on the way home for many students of bluebonnet elementary school which was just up the park ridge hill. later mclean junior high school would be built in the same neighborhood, just off dryden road, which was where my paternal grandparents lived at the time in the westcliff addition. one time i had been up in my nesting place for a long time after school when i saw mother calling to me from down below. i had forgotten that i had a music lesson with mr. langley that afternoon. mr. langley was not only my accordion instructor, but also was the circulation manager of the “southside sun”, a small complimentary neighborhood publication, which my brother pat and i helped to deliver once or twice a week. i think i caught a bit of a walloping for not showing up on time for my lesson. mother probably took off her black belt, and we all knew what that meant.

i can remember dreary winter days in different south fort worth neighborhoods where pat and i would deliver the papers. we would place them in mailboxes or in someone’s screen door; and if there happened to be more than one front door or a side door, we might leave one there too. but we weren’t like some of the boys that got caught ditching their papers. one time mr. langley took us to a place where some papers were ditched and we saw what had been done, but we didn’t do it, and i don’t think we ever did. if we were delivering to a business we would usually go inside to hand out the paper, and we particularly liked a certain french fry shop where you could buy a cone of hot fries very cheaply on a cold day. mother might come and pick us up, and i would be thinking of dinner...perhaps polish sausage and grits with red-eye gravy.

i remember one time dad came and picked us up in our new red and white station wagon, the one we later rode in to connecticut. it was really sharp and i have some home movies of it. i can’t remember if that was the one with the third seat that faced backwards, or the one with the little two seater in the back. either way the car was nifty. it was probably 1956.

i was maybe ten or eleven at the time, and i remember wandering along the matted rushes among the cane breaks by myself one day; and i thought i saw a man beckon to me out of a cave, a dark hole in the bushes, where i saw him standing. i was frightened and went away, and later i told dad about it and we went back; but i could never find that place again. it was as if it had never existed.

the creek and its environs were a wonderful playground, but the circle itself was even more magical in a way. when we first moved to the circle, there wasn’t really any park at all. it was just a dirt road that ran around a vacant circle of dirt and weeds. in 1949 during the great flood that reached the second story of the montgomery wards building down on seventh street, large army tankers of water lined up around the circle and dispensed clean water because all of the public water had been contaminated. we had to take typhoid and diphtheria shots, and mother would take us to the country club at glen garden to shower. we boiled water, i think, even the water we got from the army tanks.

i have a vague memory of the car being stranded down in the park, not far from the montgomery wards building, where the waters would eventually reach the second story, and having to wade out in waist deep water; but i may just be imagining that. i could ask mother, but we hardly ever remember things the same way.

later the circle was covered with sand and we played desert safari on it. once i was walking across the desert with a canteen of water, and i was confronted by a group of neighborhood bullies who emptied all my water out on the sand and left me crying. about that time our neighbor eleanor hayden drove by and stopped and took me home. sometimes the bullies were so bad i carried an old trumpet and talked to imaginary legions of angels i could summon to my defense. once the bullies chased me around university street to an apartment where my cousin lalu and her husband dan were living with their new baby. dan took me home and offered me protection.

there was a little redbud tree that stood next to the path that led to the haydens, right next to mr. harris’s house. mr. harris was the renter who lived in the little garage apartment behind our house at 3404 park ridge. he paid forty dollars a month to live there, and parked his car under the wisteria arbor until it became too dangerous, and dad and i had to tear it down. i remember all of the trees. some of them are still standing. the house itself is a rent house today, and it’s for rent right now. if i had the money, i’d go live there, but i don’t think i could talk the housing authority (i am on housing assistance) into letting me live there alone. (note: 2013. the house has now been sold again and totally remodeled. it is almost unrecognizable. it reminds me of the house in beatlejuice, the movie, when the ghosts come back and at first do not know where they actually are.)

mr. harris was usually gone during the week, and mother told me later she found gin or vodka bottles when she cleaned up his apartment, as she sometimes did. but once a month mr. harris would come to the back kitchen door and give mother two twenty dollar bills, and in those days that paid a good bit of the mortgage on that wonderful house.

the house was built by nonnie owens, a music teacher; and we lived in a rent house next door to nonnie before we bought nonnie’s house. the house next door was actually on cockrell which angled off park ridge at the point. my grandparents, allen, sr. and mum, used to live in it before we did. then the owner decided to remodel it, and we had to move back to hemphill street for a while...well, actually on capps street just off hemphill. i was only five or so at the time, but i remember the apartment even though a good bit of that time i lived with my mother’s parents in dallas where i started attending public school. grandmother would bring me home on the weekends, and sometimes her foot would cramp on the pedal, and i wasn’t sure if we would make it or not. my little brother glenn was born about that time, and we got our first tv. everybody liked to watch “i love lucy”, but “lucy” came on up opposite my favorite, “mr peepers” with wally cox, and i missed seeing wally. about that time “winky dink and you” was a popular kids’ show, and we had a green plastic screen we could put up against the tv and draw on with special markers, a kind of early inter-active show. i remember doing that at grandmother’s also.

bluebonnet

we moved there before there really was much of a circle.
it was on the edge of town. just a dirt road running around and back into itself.
there were lots of wildflowers: wild verbena, black-eyed susans and indian blankets; but i don't recall any bluebonnets. those were mostly out on the highway. we called them the bluebonnet plague and believed it was carried
by the indian blankets.
sometimes we would have neighborhood wars with comanche needles. these were little shoots of a particular weed that could be plucked and had a barbed point on its head. they didn't hurt much, but they stung nonetheless.
later on the road would be paved and the circle planted as a neighborhood park. lightening bugs would flicker in the evening sky, and june bugs would crash against the screen door in the summer night.

from the blueprintreview: dorothee lang, editor



chapter three (continuing to trip)

in the fall of 1968 i tripped maybe three more times...once with just pam and myself, once with pam and two other friends, when we went to sacramento, and once with penny (p.j.) on thanksgiving day.

the trip with just pam and myself was interesting because it was the first time i tripped on holy hill. holy hill was a large protuberance in north berkeley where several theological schools and seminaries were gathered together, crowned by the pacific school of religion, a non-denominational school. pam and i dropped acid at our house near the oakland border and made our way up college avenue to bancroft street where we crossed onto the campus in front of the boalt school of law.

as we stared at the facade of that building, we seemed to see mayan hieroglyphics begin to dance over the wall. we read the large plaques, one of which said, “in a wilderness of conflicting counsels a trail has there been blazed for you”... oliver wendel holmes. the other read, “when i think of the law, i think of a princess mightier than she who once wrought at bayeux, weaving into her ever lengthening web figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step by which mankind has worked and fought his way from savage isolation to organic social life.” i have never forgotten those words.

we continued past faculty glade to the campanile where we took the elevator to the top. the aging operator mentioned a brass plate that was in the bancroft library, supposedly left behind at drake’s bay at point reyes by sir francis drake, and found in the 1930’s. it was later proven to be a fake. it claimed the land as “nova albion”, a mythical name for england, later popularized by willliam blake.

we walked past the giant ginko tree at the center of the campus, passed under the troll guarded passage of tollman hall (where rats inhabited psychological mazes) and climbed arch street to the pacific school. there we lay in the grass, and holding hands we rose through circles of clouds and white light into the empyrean. i saw a cloud like a white swan descending on us and asked pam if she saw what i saw, but she saw a white elephant that dissolved on impact. sitting up, she said, “don’t look now, but i think we are being watched.” surrounding us in a semi-circle were wind-puffed cherubs in the clouds. i also thought i saw strange angelic creatures like helicopters or al capp schmoos with propeller hats hovering on the edges of our vision.

we headed up arch street and called on a poet i knew, who played a cut off an album for us that sounded like a chant over and over “let out to show them”. i had seen crushed concrete as bleeding rock and torn branches as broken limbs. the song seemed to me to refer to the blood of jesus.

we stopped off at the bancroft room of the doe library and heard a poetry reading. we were obviously dressed as hippies, but sometimes we thought we were invisible. back at the house sandy’s nude encounter group was meeting upstairs. we drank tea. pam smoked pot and i read in isaiah. we both produced some art that night. pam drew a seed in its successive stages of germinating, sprouting and flowering which i interpreted as a witches’ duel, back to back, changing forms. i produced a watercolor of the two of us, her as an earth goddess clubbing me, an announcing angel, over the head like a punch and judy show. i was speaking into a microphone.

i took a bath and hallucinated sir francis drake and found a strange towel with a dragon coming up out of the water and two martians hovering in a flying saucer that read “don’t look now, but someone is watching you”. i was deeply into the prophetical works of william blake, flying saucers and dragon paths at the time. eventually i went to bed.

then there was the great day when pam and her friend debbie from new york and i think david s. (to whom pam was eventually married) and i went to sacramento on what we called angel guide tours. we dropped acid in a pancake house before we got to sacramento. we toured the junior college where pam had studied art and then went to the state capitol. we were tripping outside ronald reagan’s office. we saw the great seal of the state of California, swimming up the coast, and a large statue of earl warren. we came out from an underground tunnel near the tower bridge, and i thought i was back in london. there was a pall mall. we saw the specifically “yew” on the grounds, and the branches performed alchemical multiplications. we ended up in an antique mall near downtown where there was a juice bar with mammary-like headed dispensers and an old bookstore with strange titles like “huber the tuber”, the life story of a tuberculosis. we found joan where she worked at a jewelry store on avenue k., and she agreed to meet us later.

that night pam and david and debbie went back to the city, but joan and i went to see “the lion in winter”. she was france (saint joan) and i was england (saint george). we buzzed all the way through the movie. i stayed with friends of pam’s and tripped all night reading national geographics and took the bus back home the next day; or did those people drive me home, and we stopped off at walnut grove on the river road and ate in a chinese restaurant?

that was also the trip on which i thought i got saved by a salvation army band, however temporarily. it was sacramento. we went to see “it’s a beautiful day”, the rock band, that night. they sang “white bird with a golden tail” and had an electric violin.

by the time thanksgiving rolled around i had talked penny j. into coming to california. i sent her enough money to fly standby. there was a mix up about the airport, and i went to oakland before i went to san francisco international. we returned to berkeley and slept until thanksgiving morning when we dropped acid and walked college avenue to the campus, as i had done with pam. i remember hallucinating patterns in the concrete and being concerned about getting lost in my hallucinations.

we sat under the giant ginko as a hell’s angel and his female sidekick walked by, and he said “i hate this campus. i hate every tree on it”. again i thought we might have been invisible. then we saw someone disappear into a grove near the creek like the white rabbit in “alice in wonderland”. we followed the lead and found a large redwood with a brass plaque commemorating the founding of the college from which the university “sprang”. we seemed to hear a strange twang as i read the plaque out loud. penny questioned the wisdom of people who nail plaques on trees.

we climbed up holy hill and had essentially the same experience as pam and i. we rose through circles of cloud and light until penny said, “i don’t think i’m supposed to be here. it’s not my trip”. we came crashing down. i dissolved in tears. i could not believe i could be so wrong. we went back to the student union and ran into a character called white rabbit on telegraph avenue who was still expecting turkeys. we hitchhiked home. she told me to keep writing poetry, and made a reservation to fly home. i told her good bye at the bus terminal in san francisco, the airport shuttle. she didn’t want me to go to the airport. knowing what i know now, i wonder if she was telling the truth or might not have rendezvoused with someone whom i later found out she had been seeing.

that was the end of my trips in 1968 except for the one i took in texas in late december which is commemorated in my poem, “christmas fort worth 1968”.

christmas, fort worth, ‘68

the trees acknowledged me,
appreciating
my attention.

as i pressed my back against its bark,
an elm tree yielded a soft embrace
and wrapped its trunk around
my trunk.

the sandstone flagstones
in a deserted gazebo
displayed themselves,
as they performed
translucent patterns.

walking home,
where nobody walks,
i noticed people staring from cars,
as i picked up scattered cotton boles
near the cattle barns
where the stock show would open.

cotton, boy, i said to myself,
what do you know about cotton?
i asked and then
my father drove up
in a brand new oldsmobile
and asked me to listen to
his stereo.

later that night dad and i were watching tv when we suddenly got a channel we had never received before. there was an old pentecostal preacher with a blackboard, and he pointed at it and said, “on the right hand we have the spiritual man and on the left hand we have the carnal man, and what we are looking for is a revelation by which the carnal man can become the spiritual man”. at that point a ghost appeared in the tv and it was a monkey climbing up a tree. i said to dad, “do you see what i see?” yes, he replied, it isn’t one of your goddamned hallucinations. he didn’t even know that i was taking acid at the time.
then i went to the seventh street theater and watched “yellow submarine” and spent most of the night in an oak tree in monticello park.


the house on park ridge:
another treatment

I

whenever it rained
the roof would leak
and we would put
cooking pans
around the back room
to collect the water.
stains like clouds
would appear on
the ceiling in the
brown wallpaper.

once at night
i thought i saw
granddaddy coming
through the ceiling
to get me and
i was scared.

II

we covered the walls
with maps we took
from granddaddy’s old
national geographics,
a stack of which
were in the closet
to be cut up
for school reports.
we would mark the maps
up with crayolas.

III

years later grand-
daddy’s sister bert
wanted to give me
her old national
geographics before
she died, but i
was away at the time
and we were no
longer close; she
was so very
conservative.

IV

i remember one
time bert and bess,
her younger sister,
came to cali-
fornia; but i
didn’t see them,
in part because
i was with penny
and because my hair
was so very long.

V

once I took
penny to bert’s
for supper and bert
told us about
the time she called
the f.b.i. during the
second world war
because someone
in the drug store
was speaking with
a german accent.

VI

but bert was very
good to me
in many ways.
the family intellectual,
she didn’t like the
kennedys, but
was real big on
ronald reagan.

VII

she had a large
rockwell kent
seascape and had
lived in venezuela
when she was married
to uncle fred
who used to recite
“the elephant’s child”
by rudyard kiping
to us kids
at family funerals.


christmas eve

when we get to mum and allen’s in several cars, dad gives me a bottle of scotch and tells me to go put it on the bathroom window sill in the back of the house. i do that and come back in through the screened in front porch where the large ceramic placard of adam and eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that i gave to dodo is standing near the front door. there are christmas lights everywhere. it is cold outside, so when i open the door the hot air gushes out and almost makes me faint. inside are all my father’s living relatives. we have to go around and shake hands with all the men and kiss all the women.

my father’s sister dodo (who lifts a cup) and his mother mum and his brother jack and jack’s wife maxine and their kids and mum’s sister evelyn also known as emo or ta and allen’s sister aunt edie who has recently moved back from california are all there. allen’s not there; he’s on his hospital bed in his room in the back. there are dodo’s grown children and grandson. that’s about it. it’s the early 70’s and everybody is drinking eggnog which is laced with rum and bourbon, but allen doesn’t know it, or at least pretends not to know it, because allen doesn’t drink anymore. that’s why the bottle is on the ledge outside, so people can drag each other out back for a drink, although i can remember a year when allen sat at the kitchen table with a little bottle of rye. oh yeah, of course my mother and dad are there, jinky and bub, and my brothers pat and glenn. bub would usually be in the back with allen, as might any of the male members of the family. we all go back and wish allen, sr. a merry christmas. he peers at us out of his better eye and wishes us one as well.

bub, allen, jr., might be carving the turkey in the kitchen. that’s his job. he’ll give you a little piece of it if you hang around him. jack and emo might go out back for a drink. they would look at all the leaves and complain about them. what are they good for anyway? and they might complain about the clouds. well, they’re something for the angels to ride on. that’s how it is with old alcoholics, and we are pretty much all alcoholics on this bus anyway…baby ones in the making, if nothing else.

the house is decorated extravagantly, over-decorated by any stretch of the imagination... lights and angel hair everywhere. the tree is large and surrounded by mountains of presents. there are bubbling lights all over its snowy branches. when time comes for the presents, someone has to play santa claus. in the old days it would have been allen, sr.; then it devolved upon jack and bub, and finally on pat and me. it goes on for a long time. everyone gets lots of presents. and the room is awash in paper and ribbons which get stuffed in a giant box and taken out by the curb.

if allen, sr,. can come to the living room, he’ll play christmas carols on the spinet piano and we’ll all gather around and sing for a while. allen plays pretty well considering he’s missing one little finger that got caught in a car door. he can still play ragtime once in a while in spite of it. then comes the meal. it’s usually turkey and ham and baked beans and potato salad and a lot of other stuff. it’s not my favorite meal at all. as a matter of fact, i don’t really like it, but we all eat a big plate of food before it’s time to go.

sometimes my relatives give me a bad time with advice. i didn’t like it then and i wouldn’t like it now, but they’re all long gone and they meant well. even emo would chime in at times, but then those of us who have survived don’t have a lot to do with each other anyway. they reminded me of the relatives in kipling’s story, “the elephant’s child”, that were always giving him spankings until he came back with his long trunk, and he spanked them. i try to keep up with a couple of my cousins over the internet, but we hardly ever see one another. of course, i keep up with my brothers, or at least i try. (note 2013. my younger brother glenn is now deceased. he died two years ago in new jersey from complications from a car accident. he had married a woman from brazil. she has gone back there now.)

after it’s all over, we gather up our stuff and leave. yeah, grandmother latimer is usually there as well since granddaddy died. she’s my mother’s mother. she is real sweet. they’re all real sweet, especially dodo, and i miss them all, but heck, growing up’s not easy on anybody. anyway, after we leave we go to midnight mass, my immediate family that is. we’re not catholic, but we became episcopalians. it’s a good religion and mother and i still follow it. the church will be hot and stuffy, and once again i feel like passing out from the incense, but it’s all very beautiful and really it’s the best part of christmas.

after church we go home, and dad might make bloody marys, and we might have our own christmas, or we might wait until morning. but that’s another story. we would, however, usually watch mass from saint peter’s on tv and play with the dog and go to bed. (dad was always impressed with the pope. he said that if anyone had the answers to life’s questions, the pope was probably the one. that seems a little ironic now.) it was all very wonderful, and it was all a long time ago. christmas is not like that now, at least now for mother and me. pat and nancy might come up from conroe, or glenn and his family might be here, but most of the time it’s just the two of us. we go to church together, and exchange presents and tell each other we love each other, but that’s about it. there’s never any alcohol. it’s not the way it used to be, not at all, and sometimes maybe that’s for the best.


college years

in the fall of 1962 i began my four years at rice university. they were good years. it was an excellent school, and i think it is fair to say that my serious intellectual life began there. my roommate my freshman year was my best friend in high school. we played golf and tennis together. we sometimes dated some of the same young women. we were close, but not inordinately so.

my course load my freshman year was fairly heavy: introduction to calculus, first year chemistry and physics, american history and english composition with an introduction to literature. the first three should have been my best subjects; they were in high school. but rice was much more difficult than i expected. i just barely kept my head above water. the history course with dr. masterson was excellent, but at 8 a.m. i was often drowsy and fell asleep during lectures. the real change for me was my english class. i had not done especially well in high school english, although as i have mentioned i scored very high on the english composition achievement test for college entrance exams. (as a matter of fact, i scored 790 out of a possible 800, the highest score on that test ever recorded at the time in my high school.) at rice my freshman english professor was a fairly recent phd. from wisconsin who also had studied at oxford, and who specialized in medieval literature. dr. o’grady was about 31 years old and a resident associate of baker college, my residential affiliation at rice; and as a matter of fact occupied rooms just above the one where my roommate and i lived. his course was a sort of religious conversion, but a somewhat agnostic one.

in literature i seemed to find all of my deepest concerns addressed; and although it was unfamiliar territory, i took to it immediately. i began to read widely and to be fascinated at first by the intensity of meaning and the broad range of issues considered, many of which, the spiritual and the sexual especially, seemed to be pressing upon me at the time. by the spring, i had made up my mind to switch from a science-engineering program to what was called an academic program with the intention of majoring in english.

that summer of 1963 i spent in fort worth reading and working as a groundsman for lenox industries air-conditioning plant. i had a completely new direction and a secure relation to a teacher whom i respected and admired. it was a comfortable and exciting time. here i append a brief story from that summer.


watering mr. ingram

i never actually met mr. jordon. his wife sylvia was a friend of my mother’s; and, once it had been determined that i would spend the summer at home, pursuing my reading during the interim between my freshman and sophomore years as a newly converted english major at a not terribly distant college, mother undertook to find some employment for me. mr. jordan was an executive at a local air conditioning plant, and although he was seriously ill at the time with an illness that would eventually take his life, he was able to arrange for me to become a yard worker or lawn keeper for the rather extensive grounds that surrounded the executive offices adjacent to the plant.

my day was to begin at 4 a.m. because it was necessary to do most of the lawn watering before 7 a.m. when the plant itself would actually commence operations. i was told to report to a mr. john smith, the maintenance supervisor; and i rather imagine that it was old man ingram, the night watchman, who admitted me to the establishment grounds that first morning, after i had driven crosstown in my diminutive fiat 500, and made my way to the executive building where i found mr. smith busy vacuuming.

john smith was an older black man, perhaps in late middle age, somewhat portly, and, i would later learn, an ordained minister. as a matter of fact, john smith had been the first black graduate of the school of theology at a local university. he was a fascinating and brilliant man. i would learn that he had had three wives and had maybe a dozen children. his first wife had borne him eight children in about seven years, and finally succumbed to the process. his second wife and he had been married maybe twenty years when they separated without having any children. he was currently married to his third wife who was much younger and had borne him four more children in as many years. john had a taste for the salacious, but it was just as likely that we would talk politics as religion or sex. john kennedy was president at that time.

john showed me how to set up the sprinkler heads in the early morning, and then i would help him around the executive offices, often vacuuming or emptying trash. if things were slow, john would let me slip away to an empty shed for a few winks of shut-eye. after seven o’clock i would commence with the riding mower and later trim hedges or weed beds. it was a boring job, but i was full of new thoughts from college, and often thought of the gifted professor who had opened the world of literature for me and whom i hoped to visit later in the summer.

the only fly in the ointment was old man ingram. he was an ornery old cuss from mississippi who liked to talk about senators john stennis and strom thurmond, and he didn’t think much of my spending so much time with john smith, he often told me so.

but john and i got back at mr. ingram really good one time. we knew what time he would have to make his rounds and stick his key in the clock socket to show when he’d been there, and i would set the sprinklers so they sprayed on the sidewalk often, and mr. ingram would have to run fast not to get wet. well, ol’ john and i would hide in the bushes and watch mr. ingram run, and we would chuckle low and have a good time.

the summer went by pretty fast. i had to work on saturdays too, but john didn’t. i remember one time he came by in his large sedan with his young wife and kids just to see if i was really working, i was, but i might have just been lucky that time. i spent a lot of time asleep in that shed. but i got my work done and the money was good. that was the only real summer job i had in college, but it was a good one. it was all well over forty years ago. i don’t see how john could still be alive, but my old friend capitola bishop, who worked for my grandmother, was in her late 90’s when i last spoke to her, and she still lived in her own house and drove her car to the store and to church on sundays. i could try and check on john up at the college. somebody might remember him, but they probably don’t keep track of things like race.


chapter four (back to berkeley)

when i got back to berkeley in early 1969, sandy m. and i went back to point reyes national seashore with a law student friend of his. we tripped on some very good acid that night. there was a full moon and the moonlight seemed to gather in pools cradled in the waves, refracted into rainbow colors of red and blue and yellow and green. the moon was like a great lamp suspended in the sky. it’s pock-marked face made me think of what dad had told me about his shooting marble, or “taw”, which he soaked in lard to get rid of the “moons” or crescent marks where it had struck hard.

i remember going into the rather elaborate washroom at the beach which had an automated hand dryer. just before he turned it on, sandy said, “the next sound you hear will be the voice of your president”. lyndon johnson was president at that time. it bellowed hot air. the law student complained that he wasn’t getting off on the acid. i had a vision of him and sandy as union soldiers burying confederate dead. i pointed out some faces in the sand dunes, and then all at once...he got it.

i spent a good bit of time lost in the dunes. sometimes being high on acid felt a lot like being seriously drunk. i read somewhere that there were experiments to use it in the treatment of alcoholics. there were large black and white spotted cattle grazing up there. the dune plants seemed very otherworldly. sandy and the law student spent the night hacking at old redwood logs on fire and hashing out their problems. i remained rather aloof and had a pretty good time up until and through dawn. it wasn’t a really interesting trip, except for the moon and the dunes and the sea; but it felt like it might have been the purest form of the chemical i had taken thus far.

after that i moved to san francisco to share a flat on upper masonic above the haight-ashbury with peter v. it was 1969 and peter was an old roommate of someone i knew from rice. pam and joan came to visit with another friend. pam was suffering from extreme poison oak which she had contracted on a hike we took in the berkeley hills. the backs of her legs were like raw meat, and she was eventually scarred by the experience; but we took acid together again.

joan and i wandered around the neighborhood and found a little children’s museum where we saw a replica of the hanging gardens of babylon and watched an owl eat a live mouse. i made chile in the kitchen which began to look like alphabet soup. i was often hallucinating alphabets. i would see letters in the bark of trees, especially sequoias. later i found out from my grandmother that i was related to the cherokee chief sequoyah who invented the cherokee alphabet. this was at a time when i was courting joan pretty heavily. she eventually moved to san francisco and we had a brief affair, but i wasn’t what she was looking for. it’s odd. san francisco is special to both sir francis drake and the franciscan friars who founded the original mission dolores. i just mention that in passing. (note: but now that I think of it, my current catholic parish Is manned by franciscan friars.)

that night we went to north beach and tripped around a high-rise housing project where there were strange echoes that made our voices sound like they were being amplified. i went back later and could never find that effect again. i drove that night as well and there seemed to be dragons coming out of strange corners. i think we went to a foreign movie. that’s about all i remember of that trip.

once i tripped with a woman named susan s. who was a friend of pam’s. we went to the arboretum in golden gate park, and i felt very wasted and hybrid-like, or overbred and artificial. i was glad when she finally went home. i was not very interested in susan, but she seemed to like me a lot. once we ended up in a three-way with a friend of mine from rice who i think later died with aids. i was pretty much avoiding my homosexuality at that time. i had hung out at the rendezvous lounge when i first got to the west coast, but i had only been with women for some time at this point in my drug experiments

it was about that time that i met jeanne l. through bob high in the student union at berkeley. she was sweet and pretty, and we seemed to hit it off well. we became lovers and broke up once when i thought i was going to be with joan, but hooked up again as i was dropping out of graduate school and getting ready to return to texas. we had some great hitchhiking trips to mendocino, and jeanne was going to come live with me in austin, but her father died about that time; and my situation in texas was not good, so i went back to berkeley, and we began living together there with her roommates. later debbie f., pam’s friend with whom we had tripped,. moved in with her boy friend al from new york.

the five of us lived together until the following spring. in the fall we went to the free rolling stones concert at altamont speedway. that spring i taught at laney junior college in oakland, and we tripped at tassajara hot springs. later that spring doug p. and his group came to stay with us, and i eventually left with them. but that will all be discussed later after i write a little more about my life at rice university.

here’s a poem from when i lived in san francsico in early 1969


head for the hills

the vacant play of spotlights scans
low-ceilinged clouds of the disenchanted city.

the poet standing on the upper slopes
of his mountain questions if the searchlights could be
looking for him.

these are idle thoughts of blasphemy.
he is incensed and casts
his curse on the city.

still the lights play like wings and reveal
cloud gaps where the poet escapes and sings
among his superficial stars.

what if an angel of the lord should descend
into these towering lights, perhaps
at the intersection of them all?

now the frightened poet thinks he sees
six-fold wings of the seraphim hovering.

only it is the cry of sirens
setting vibrations into the ground of clouds.

the used car lots who rent their spotlights from
some advertising agency inadvertently
call these angels of death into play.

the poet falling on his knees hopes
everyone is on a mountain or at least
everyone who needs to be.


and here is a poem about rice and san francisco

i think i have always loved the fog,
if always can mean anything at all.
i don’t remember so clearly from childhood,
for even that is as if it was shrouded in mist.
when i moved to houston for college i would
walk late at night on the deserted campus
in my london fog tapping my umbrella
against the wet pavement.
and even after i moved off campus
i would walk the empty streets of houston,
the traffic lights blinking,
dimly clouded with coffee smells
crawling up the bayou.
later i moved to california
and got to know the dense san francisco
fogs with the fog horns sounding
in the distance and again
the smell of roasting coffee.
as you crossed the bridge from
oakland to the city there was
a giant neon arab advertising
a coffee company. and then
after i returned from morocco
and began taking drugs
i dreamed of an arab, perhaps someone
i met in morocco, who wanted my address
in the u.s., coming to the screen door
looking for old brass for sale.
tripping at night around the kitchen
labels began to speak to me,
and the coffee can read
“head for the hills” and i did.
dad had a dream where an arab
came into the office in a long black robe
made of tiny chain links, looking for me.
that i said, interpreting,
was an attempt at black mail.
these thoughts drift up to me out of a fog
of memory. there was a paint company sign
with a green globe of earth gradually
covered with red paint like blood.
it said: we cover the earth.
in my dream there is always this delicate
blanket of fog that i have become
acquainted with, like a quaint tint
on a windshield or watercolor.
i have been one acquainted with the fog.


chapter five (more rice years)

in the fall of 1963 i returned to rice, but by then had decided not to continue to live on campus. instead i elected to move with four other men into a three-bedroom apartment where i shared a room with a psychology student from memphis. we would be roommates for two years. it was in that apartment that i started learning to cook my own meals, or in fact cooked in turn for the five of us; and i’m grateful to have the experience i have had in cooking because it serves me so well today.

i began studying french and german at that time. french i would study for years to come, and i still take an interest in it. german i only studied for one year, and that not terribly intensely. i wish i knew the language better now that i correspond with a german editor sometimes. i took an english literature survey course with alan grob that was very helpful, a course that reached an unusual climax at the time of the assassination of president john kennedy because the text appointed for the next day in lecture was milton’s “lycidas”, an elegiac lament for someone cut down unfairly young. many rice students remember the poignancy of dr. grob’s lecture that day.

i also took an introduction to the literature of the english restoration and the eighteenth century with an excellent professor, ronald paulson, from yale, who was editing the graphic works of william hogarth. it was way over my head, but i survived, with help from friends, and came to do fairly well in it. i learned to appreciate poets like dryden and pope very much, and have continued to study that period of literature all of my life. it was in dr. paulson’s course that i became friends with another english major from my class and from fort worth with whom i was friends for many years until an unfortunate set of circumstances caused her to terminate the relationship maybe a decade ago at this time.

i also took an honors seminar in modern literary criticism with dr. walter isle. there i was introduced to many of the major critical writers of our times, some of whom i had seen in person when they visited during rice’s semi-centennial celebration the previous year, and a number of whom i would meet later, especially those of the southern school, because of my studies with monroe spears which i will discuss shortly.

i dated at rice, extensively. we had a lot of parties, and i learned to appreciate alcohol, perhaps to a little too great an extent. at first i dated mostly local high school girls. i didn’t have a real romance with a rice woman until i was a senior, but i often met young women whose company i enjoyed; and since i had a somewhat flashy car at the time, and was a rice student, it wasn’t that hard to get a date.

the summer after my sophomore year i spent again in fort worth, primarily reading, but something else happened that summer that changed my world. my father had a sister, dorothea george nesbitt, who was a fairly well-known artist in the adjoining community of arlington, texas. dodo by then was divorced and living again with her parents in fort worth. she had gone into the advertising business with a man named del dally and was operating a small art school in an old house on fort worth’s south side. my great aunt, edith robb, had moved back to fort worth from california by then, and aunt edie and i enrolled in dodo’s summer course. it was another flash of lightning. i took to painting immediately, and painted extensively all summer and continued to paint often during my remaining two years at rice. i showed my work to my professors, and had a small show of my work in the commons of my residential college my senior year. there was no official art department at rice at the time, so i never actually enrolled in art class there; but i did apply to the slade school in london before i graduated and seriously thought of going to art school instead of graduate school at that time, when i was leaving rice.

also, around this time a good friend of mine took me under his wing (he was a converted science to english major as well, but had the background to sustain it) and introduced me to serious classical music. he literally gave me a course in the subject, and i will always be grateful to him for that. my roommate and i also attended a season of the houston symphony with sir john barbarolli conducting and at least one opera. i began listening to more classical music in the arts reading room at rice, and began studying the great pictorial works of the west through art books in the same department.

my junior year i studied the works of geoffrey chaucer with dr. o’grady in the fall, and medieval dream vision allegory in the spring, when i read dante for the first time. they were very creative and stimulating courses. i also studied with monroe spears, the recent editor of the sewanee review, who had come to rice from sewanee, tennessee, as the moody professor of poetry. dr. spears was a very impressive man, and i spent a lot of quality time with him. i was frequently a visitor in his home. i think he genuinely liked me, but a chill set in after i got sick in california, and we never really communicated very well after that. his daughter had disappeared into the haight-ashbury about that time. at rice i studied the poetry of t. s. eliot, ezra pound and w.h.auden with dr. spears. he was an acknowledged authority on auden, but it was pound that struck me as a major interest and model, and certainly i am indebted to dr. spears for that and for the fact that i eventually published two poems in the sewanee review.

the next summer i went to new york to study at columbia university summer college. along the way i stopped in evanston, illinois, where my brother pat was attending seabury-western episcopal seminary. we had a good visit and saw myrna loy in” barefoot in the park”. i was introduced to the bahai religion at their great temple in winnetka and would attend introductory “firesides” of bahais in new york. i rarely attended church at that time, although officially still episcopalian.

in new york i lived at john jay hall on the columbia campus. i studied music appreciation and modern poetry. i spent a lot of time going to plays and concerts. i saw “fiddler on the roof” and “funny girl” on broadway. i saw “krapp’s last tape” at the cherry lane theater. i saw “the fantastiks”. and i saw shaw’s “man and superman”. i hung out at all the major museums and went to galleries as well. i went to the world’s fair. i did a lot of things, but something happened in new york that changed my life for many years to
come.

i went to a shakespeare in the park one evening in central park. it might have been “love’s labour lost”. after the play a young man came up and spoke to me. i did not know him very well at the time, but he was a rice undergraduate a year or two behind me whom i will call john. x. john x. was a friend of a friend of mine in his class at rice. john was spending the summer in new york and was working in the mailroom at maidenform bra company. he had an apartment in greenwich village and was rooming with another rice student whom i did not know at all at the time. john and i began going to concerts and plays together. one evening we were supposed to meet at lewisohn stadium to hear duke ellington perform. john did not show up. i went back to his apartment, which was near the corner of bleeker and macdougal, and found his roommate who took me to a drug store where he made a phone call and then took me to a social gathering in a high rise apartment on w. 14th street. that was when my life began to change.

a man around thirty years old answered the door, very friendly, in very good humor and ushered me into a room with two grand pianos. i was offered a drink, and the man, whom i’ll call jay, and who turned out to be a classical keyboard artist from texas, began asking me questions, like “did i play the piano?” he took my hand and began looking at my fingers and said, “oh, yes, my dear, you really must learn to play the piano.” this went on for quite some time until i asked about john, and finally jay took me to a room they called the reed room (i thought later it might have been “read”, like where you went to “read” or be“read” for that matter), and i found john in a somewhat compromising position with a young man i got to know better later whom i’ll call peter r. john apologized for not meeting me for the concert and said to relax and have a good time, and we would visit later. i was then taken to a large back bedroom where a number of men were piled up on the largest bed i had ever seen, watching diana ross and the supremes on t.v. and screaming, “it’s the gospel, it’s the gospel”. john’s roommate sat on the floor and watched me intently. later he told me he was in awe because of someone who was there who was a famous recording artist.

as the evening went on, the occupants of the two rooms switched places. john and peter r. moved back to the bedroom, and the rest of us moved into the reed room where we began to play cards, hearts or spades, i’m not sure which. it was rather like the mad hatter’s tea party. these were outrageous homosexuals, and i had never been in the company of such before. they were prominent in the classical music world, and they had rather silly pet camp names i won’t repeat. they wanted to call me grace. i didn’t know what to make of it. i was essentially in shock. these men had been in europe together and had very bizarre stories to tell. they were unabashed and unrepentant. it looked like hell to me. i sometimes refer to this group as the "horror wits".

i went home to columbia late that night and was in shock for at least two weeks. i spoke to no one except to order a meal or buy a subway token. two weeks later i ran into john x. at a new york philharmonic concert, and he took me out for a drink to a gay bar. i admitted to being somewhat homoerotic, but could not accept what i was encountering as relating directly to myself. we wandered around greenwich village, especially on christopher street, and eventually went to coney island. john was obviously trying to determine my reaction to all this. i didn’t give a lot away. however, back at his apartment, he pulled out some pornography which was completely new to me, and we had the beginnings of a sexual encounter which was not fully consummated, but which was the first i had ever had with another person. i was 20 years old

the pianist, jay, began calling me at my dorm regularly, wanting me to spend time with him. we would go out to eat in the village, get drunk, maybe see some outrageous parody of an opera like “norma” at a gay nightclub and bar and end up back at his apartment with him trying to seduce me. i resisted. he might get as far as getting me mostly undressed and giving me a massage, but that was as far as i let it go. i would go home at four in the morning and eat powdered donuts and drink instant coffee in my room and read butler yeats in the early hours when i could hear the bells from the episcopal cathedral of saint john the divine just around the corner from campus. jay set me up with a young film director who also wanted to bed me badly, but i got up and got dressed at the last minute and left.

john had carried on with peter r. for a while and then taken up with a friend of peter’s from massachusetts. i had conceived something of a liking for peter r. who was working as an intern at macy’s department store and went to ask him to go to a show together, but he turned me down. he was from a prominent new england family and an english major, and years later we would hook up at berkeley and have an affair, but at the time he wasn’t especially interested. i recently found out over the internet that peter r. is deceased.

nothing else of that nature actually happened that summer, but i went home determined to find a young woman to marry and not to be a part of that world. i seriously approached a woman i had dated in high school who was a member of a family to which mine was very close at the time. she told me she could not get serious about me, but that i would always be like a brother to her, a very distant brother it has turned out to be indeed. back at rice i dated three women in quick succession. one was a fellow senior english major whom i really liked but who turned out to be already committed to someone else. another was a young woman whom i almost forget, but she was a friend of john x.’s, a year or two younger, and we had some passionate encounters while high on alcohol, (not i remind you fully consummated yet at all) but she decided she wasn’t especially interested either. then came penny j., and that has been the crowning romance of my life. certainly i was ready to fix on whomever i could, and i threw out all the stops for penny.

penny was from illinois and the family of a prominent doctor. she was the oldest child. she was very well read. she was a little thin, but very good looking. her skin was still unfinished, but she had long dark blond hair like julie christie or marianne faithful, and very attractive tapered legs. i loved her inordinately. i dated her as much as possible. there was a lot of passion between us; but ultimately she threw me over for someone who had a bad reputation with women, and finally she gave herself to him, and i gave up on her in the process. we quit seeing each other almost completely until i told her good bye at the end of the year as i left to go to california and berkeley.

during that year i did go to some parties at a gay man’s house in houston where some of the people from new york were present. i did eventually attempt to have sex with a young painter from london (with whom I now have occasisonal internet contact) and had several brief homosexual affairs in houston after that before i graduated. i dated another young woman from my class, and we were really fairly compatible, but the spark was not there as it had been with penny. i decided not to pursue the relationship. none of the homosexual affairs i had showed any likelihood of developing into anything serious. i hardly knew what that would have meant at the time.

a year later penny would come to california for the summer of love and we would have an affair around the time i took my master’s degree oral exams; and i had great hopes again for the two of us, but she chose otherwise again and i failed.

i drove to california that summer of 1966, hauling a trailer with all of my books and clothes and paintings. i stopped off in santa fe for the first time, but it didn’t really make that much of an impression on me at the time. i slowed down in the desert for a hitchhiker but decided better of it. the car began breaking down in the desert, but i made it into the oakland piedmont before it finally gave out and i had to have it towed.

in berkeley i stayed at the apartment of sandy m., the older brother of a fellow rice student, who was spending most of his time with chris. w. i was impressed with their relationship because i had never been around an unmarried couple essentially living together before. later they would break up and chris w. and i were together briefly.

i studied hard that first year and especially that first summer. i did the 18th century again and first encountered the prophetic works of william blake. i met some interesting people, especially young women from the east coast just in berkeley for summer school. two of them went with me to yosemite. i took my meals at a student co-operative. i hung out at the swimming pool at strawberry canyon quite a bit; and finally, from one of my contacts at rice, i got the address of a gay bar in san francisco. i had finally accepted that world somewhat in houston when i hung out at the university lounge, i think it was, which was where i contracted my first real intimacy that was fully developed. it did not last long, but i was in a sense hooked on the sex, the alcohol and the attention.

i have written a poem about that bar, the rendezvous in san francisco, that about says what i have to say about it. i rarely went there. i even more rarely met anyone, but it was an introduction to san francsico gay life that would take on deeper meaning in years to come.

that winter i met lenore mc. she was a senior honors student in thomas parkinson’s yeats and contemporary poetry seminar. we both worked on ezra pound and the poetry of robert duncan, a gay san francisco poet. we became close, and i would have married lenore if i could have, but in the end she also turned me down. the encounter with parkinson was of course momentous, and i include below an essay on that subject.

by spring i was preparing to take my m.a. orals when penny announced she was coming to california. the summer was idyllic. we went to yosemite and carmel and to hear the buffalo springfield and generally had a very good time. i successfully passed my master’s exam. i had been seeing a fellow former rice student in california that spring; but without my knowledge until years later, he and penny began seeing each other, and i was left out in the cold. that fall i rode the motorcycle penny had convinced me to buy to claremont, california, east of l. a., to visit a girl friend of john x’s, to get over the fact that i had lost penny, which became final when she began taking psychedelic drugs back in houston with someone else. we had talked about it, but it had never actually come to pass.

i decided to go to europe for six months which i did in march, spent my time writing and visitng churches and museums, and finally had an affair with an english art student, ruth p., which spilled over into my time in paris during the student worker riots of 1968 when i met the novelist mary mccarthy and george orwell’s widow, sonja. after that i left for spain and morocco. that is discussed in the travelog below as well i should also mention that at this time i had lunch at the london zoo with my former teacher from berkeley, the english novelist, angus wilson; and mr. wilson has since become a major interest of mine.
after reading aaron shurin’s description of the rendezvous bar
on san francisco’s sutter street in joshua gamson’s
the fabulous sylvester

yes, it was that same anonymous door,
and inside a moving cordon of
preppy males in button downs
slowly circulating to frank
sinatra singing
“strangers in the night...”
eyes searching for
that lonely connection
that left you all
melancholy inside,
even if it happened to make.
it was hell.
it was hell on earth.
it was hell on
another planet...
and decades later
i went back
and it had been turned into
an AA club,
and maybe that was what it was
all about anyway...
alcohol and drugs;
at least that’s how it seems
to have turned out to be
after it was over.
the pain remains.
it doesn’t go away.
one had just as well
get used to it.
the gay life...
like drowning from
pneumonia to
“aqualung” by
death row skull.


the sayings of chairman tom

thomas parkinson was the famous yeats scholar and berkeley professor who edited the early text, a casebook on the beat, a collection of beatnik writing with which he was deeply involved.

once i was walking with tom and another professor, dr. hugo, as they discussed a bisexual colleague who brought tricks home with his wife in the house and played the moonlight sonata on the piano. tom said she was lucky he brought home trade who would listen to the moonlight sonata.

in the same conversation he mentioned that opponents would ask him, “you’re so liberal about drugs and sex, but how do you feel when it comes to your own daughter?” he said that he told them that when his oldest daughter turned sixteen he gave her an ounce of pot and a package of birth control pills and told her to be careful how she used both. as far as i know she turned out pretty well. i mentioned that there had been a pot shortage lately. tom replied, “you wouldn’t know it from the amounts that pass through my house.”

tom was on my m. a. orals committee, and i was required to see each member of the committee for an interview before the exam. when i went into tom’s office, i said, “i’m here for my pre-oral interview.” “gerry,” he replied, “we generally refer to these as your anals,” a reference to freud’s scheme of successive sexual fixation in stages of anal, oral and genital.

another time i went to tom and said, “if things don’t get any better soon, i may turn into a homosexual.” he told me i should consult a good proctologist first. what’s that, i asked. “asshole doctor, “ he replied. i might have said “that’s what i thought i was talking to.” but of course i would not have. tom was 6’7” tall and very scary.

once an irate parent had broken into his office with a gun, shot and killed tom’s teaching assistant, who was reportedly working on a dissertation entitled “the museum as a means of grace”, and shot tom in the face. he went to europe and grew a beard. i wrote him half-jokingly once that my dad would like to shoot him also. after the shooting robert duncan the poet reported that robert’s lover, the painter jess collins, had said, “the sad thing is that tom won’t even understand why God let that happen to him”.

my favorite moment with tom occurred when i was at his berkeley villa with one side of the roof removed for the installation of large paned sliding garage doors so his wife ariel, a painter, could let in the bright california sunlight for her attic studio. that night i mentioned that what i would like to see politically was “a virgin forest in every pot”. tom responded immediately, “you, gerry george, all you want to see is a little pot in every virgin.”

i have a video of tom confronting ronald reagan in the governor’s office during the people’s park crisis of 1969. he was really a pretty great guy and one of the funniest men i ever met. he was never actually chairman at berkeley, as far as i know
from european interlude

i have been asked about morocco. i left paris on july 14, 1968. ruth said good by to me at the station which was next to a carnival. it was quatorze juillet or bastille day. i rode south on a train in a cabin with a man who played tom jones singing “delilah” all night long. i woke up in spain. i don’t remember the towns too well. one i think was salamanca or maybe pamplona. the next thing i knew i was in madrid where i met a young man who took me to an apartment where i rented a bed in a dormitory style room for the night. the next day i toured the prado and wandered around madrid. i remember seeing the large bosches, including “the garden of earthly delights”, and van der weyden’s “descent from the cross”. i also remember velazquez’s “las meninas”.

i was traveling under the extra impetus i enjoyed because of the money mary mccarthy, the american novelist living in paris, had given me. i continued on to algeciras at the entrance to gibraltar where i took a boat to tangiers. arriving in tangiers i met a young man who was my guide during my stay there. he took me to a rooftop cafe and got me high on hashish and pointed to another building and kept saying, “bar bera hat on”. eventually i realized he was speaking of the woolworth heiress barbara hutton who apparently lived in that compound. he took me to a hostel, but they would not take me in because i needed a bath and a shampoo. we went somewhere else where i could clean up and then found a cheap hotel room. i was worried how i would get home. my ticket back to america had been canceled due to a bounced check. i was looking for an opportunity to work my way home on a ship. i wasn’t really into dope at this time.

we hounded the port and looked for a ship but with no luck, and i eventually went on to casablanca where i met another arab who got me stoned on hash and wine in the back of little bars and tried to help me find a ship. we failed there as well. the closest we came was an australian ship, the “sugar importer”, that was bound around the cape of good hope back to australia before it reached san francisco in the fall. that would have been too late for my student fellowship and draft deferment. i hung around the american library and approached the consulate about repatriation. the government could send me home and just cancel my passport until i paid, but it never did come to that.

i returned to tangiers and there found the relief i needed in the form of a letter and bank deposit from my father with an american express card and the opportunity to repurchase my ticket home from london in about a month’s time. i didn’t do a lot of dope, i didn’t find it that interesting, but as an encounter with islamic culture it was interesting enough and triggered thoughts and dreams as seen above.


travelog

when i returned from casablanca to tangiers i ran into some other americans at the american express office. i had just received a letter from dad with an american express card and the welcome news that he had put $300 in my bank account. there was also a letter from the english travel agency to the effect that if i now sent them the seventy-five or some odd dollars necessary, i could still retain my reservation for the flight back to the states the next month. i did that immediately and was much relieved.

these other americans were getting ready to board a boat back to spain and then cross spain to its east coast and board another boat for the balearic islands, ibiza and formentera in particular. that sounded agreeable and interesting, so i threw my lot in with them. we went to a small restaurant in the casbah and smoked some hash and ate couscous. one of the men wanted a slice of melon, but the restaurant didn’t have any. however, the proprietor sent out to another restaurant for a slice which was brought back promptly.

then we took the boat back to algecieras and boarded an old coal-burning steam engine train that was headed across southern spain. our immediate destination was granada. the train bellowed smoke which at times came into our compartment, especially when we went through a tunnel. there were two young british men in the next compartment who had a printed log of every coal stop and water stop, etc. the train would make and were checking off the times to see if we were on schedule. i asked one of them why they were doing that. he replied, “oh, we do this every year.” when i repeated my inquiry of exactly why, they replied again, “oh, spain is our favorite country.”

we arrived at granada at dusk and looked for a hostel. after getting settled, we looked for a restaurant and agreed to all share a giant potato omelet which was outstanding. we talked about the next day. they intended to continue on to alicante in the morning without taking time to view the most notable sight in granada, the alhambra. i did not realize at the time what an opportunity i was missing, so i decided to press onward with the group. it was something i still regret, like getting as far as casablanca and not proceding to marrakesh. that, however, i blame upon the unbelievable heat from which i was already suffering with the prospect of even worse heat ahead. still, it seems as if i was always just missing out on the main course of my travels as i skirted the edges on admittedly a very small budget.

in morocco i had been faced with the prospect of assisted repatriation because i was running out of funds and my check to the british travel agency had bounced and i didn’t know how i was going to get home in time to resume my fellowship and renew my draft deferment. it was 1968 and the vietnam war was at its height. i had spent my days in casablanca haunting the port, looking for a chance to work my way home on a freighter, but the one opportunity i did find was headed around the african cape to australia and would not have reached san francisco until well into the fall. all of that was now resolved. all i had to do was get back to london by the middle of august.

at alicante we spent another night in a hostel and strolled the broad promenade by the sea to pass the time until the next morning when we took a third class passage on a boat to ibiza. that meant we sat on the floor of a lower deck with chickens in crates assembled around us. it was there that i had the most unusual experience of the trip. as background i should mention that i had been able to take the trip to morocco because of some extra money i had been given in paris by the american novelist mary mccarthy. i had been introduced to ms. mccarthy by sonia orwell, the widow of george orwell, author of 1984 and animal farm. as a matter of fact, i later learned that it was sonia orwell who discovered the first to be published short stories of my friend and teacher, sir angus wilson. as i watched spellbound, the young americans began trading books and one said, “here, i’ll give you two mary mccarthy’s for one george orwell”. so if there really is no such thing as coincidence, what the hell did that mean?

the mediterranean was incredibly beautiful and blue. as we pulled into the harbor in ibiza i could hear the music of country joe and the fish on a loudspeaker. it was like the american rock i had heard in wales. it was hard to believe how ubiquitous it was. we didn’t stay long but quickly boarded another boat to formentera, a smaller island where the lady novelist george sand had lived with frederick chopin. there we hiked to a beach where a large number of hippies were camped out. i particularly remember a young frenchman who was constantly saying “beaucoup”. by this time i had formed a bond with one of the other americans, and he suggested we go to the other side of the island to camp. we did and stayed a couple of days. we ate melons and rice and eggs that were cooked at a small hut along the beach. there i met some other americans, and there i first heard of the tibetan book of the dead. at one point a spanish landowner came by and indicated we should move along the next day. we did, and by then i had a pretty serious sunburn, so i decided to return to ibiza and head north.

i spent a night on a beach in ibiza and then sat around a table with some different americans who were drinking sangria and consulting another book i had just recently heard of in london, the i ching or book of changes. i consulted the book and found the advice that “it furthers one to cross the great water.” so i left that evening on a boat for barcelona.

i only spent a day in barcelona, visiting the gaudi sites, and buying some sandals with rubber tire soles and enjoying the older part of the city with its somber cathedral. then i boarded a bus and the next day traveled north into southern france all the way to geneva. i spent the rest of the night with some germans in the bus terminal in geneva and then after a day of sightseeing boarded a train for bern. i spent a night at a hostel in bern after being accosted by a somewhat older swiss gentleman who wanted to take me to his chalet and who did succeed in getting me drunk before i insisted on going to the hostel.

bern was beautiful and i remember a dancing bear.

then i took a train to basel and from there to amsterdam. the next morning on the train we traveled along the rhine, and i remember the mist on the river and some of the large cities and an occasional castle. it was very beautiful. i spent a long day in amsterdam primarily looking at the rembrandts and then went to le havre or maybe the hook of holland from which i took a ferry back to england.

that trip was curious because as evening approached we were given blankets to bed down on the floor in the cocktail lounge where patrons were still finishing their drinks. i felt like a hooded refugee making my way off of the continent. at southhampton i took a bus or train back to london where i was reunited with my british girlfriend ruth p. whom i had left in paris on quatorze juilliet maybe a month before. we spent some more time together and traveled down to wiltshire where we stayed with the grandmother of a mutual friend who had a couple of stone houses near bath.

ruth and i said goodbye at victoria station where i had arrived five or six months before and stayed in touch for a while, but soon after i returned to the states i took my first lsd, and i think ruth was disgusted with me, because i never heard from her again. i have tried to find her periodically through the years and have an e-mail inquiry to the chelsea school of art alumni association in london now, but so far i have not located anyone important from that period of my life which was so unique. i thought then i would have an ordinary academic career and come to europe regularly, but as it turned out it was a once in a lifetime trip.


here are a few poems about traveling in the intermediate state, or bardo, as the tibetans call it, starting in the summer of 1969 after i had dropped out of graduate schoool.


close call

the moving finger
writes on the wall
of belshazzar.
the hand of God
comes to rest
over the gift of
the littlest angel.
because of my
addiction i let
the cup pass from me.
just ahead on the highway
outside las cruces
i saw two hands
with extended arms
come down from the clouds...
one white, and one dark.
they were contending.
at that very moment
a check point appeared
and we had to stop.
an officer asked
if i had a permit
to drive that car,
a drive-away,
across new mexico.
i didn’t.
i promised to get one.
he noticed my shirt,
navy surplus,
and asked if i
had been in the service.
i hadn’t. he
let me go anyway.
then i found out,
the woman traveling
with me had
marijuana
in her purse.


i was hitchhiking in california
on highway one up the coast from
san francisco. the sky was blue
with wisps of fog. a large pickup
went by and the couple in the cab
seemed to scowl at me,
but out of the rear of a camper shell
two kids were waving.
like that time in west texas
when the waitress was rude to us
because we were hippies,
and then when we left,
a kid came around the corner from
the back of the building and said,
“i think you guys are cool”.


or the time in aberdeen, washington
when the restaurant owner stood in the doorway
shaking his head and waving his hands,
“no way you are coming in here”.
i said, God will give us a better place,
and He did... on the beach
where we had breakfast
like the disciples with Jesus
shortly after the resurrection.
the next day back in berkeley,
the headline in the paper read
Hairy Monster in the Night.
sasquatch (big foot) had attacked the sheriff
of aberdeen county the night before.


now we are getting into the year 1969-70 when i lived with jeanne l. during the time i lived with peter v. in san francisco i had met jeanne in berkeley. she was a wonderful woman, and we began having an affair. i decided to try moving back to texas that summer, and jeanne was going to join me; but about that time her father died, and i could not find employment in austin, where i had rented a house; so i arranged for a drive-away car and returned to san francisco where i moved in with jeanne and others.

i lived with jeanne for about nine months. we had tripped with her roommate, ted c. that july fourth on the river up at vacaville. it was pretty classic california nature tripping. there were wasps nests built heavily into the cliffs along the river. we looked at old postcards, and i recited some of my poems; and that night we went up telegraph avenue and ate chocolate fondue and then watched picnic on tv. i have a drawing i made of jeanne’s room from that time. we lived together on blake street; but when we first met, she and ted lived above the white horse tavern on telegraph which i did not know for sure at the time, but turned out to be a gay bar.


we were tripping on acid at tamales bay
north of san francisco
and staring at elephant mountain
right off the youngbloods album.
when we started to leave,
i started finding all kinds of garbage
on the beach...
discarded salami,
a half loaf of bread.
i said what kind of idiots
throw all this food away
(or were they coming back?)
and then i heard a commotion up the trail.
i thought it was a marching jazz band
announcing the second coming, but then
they got down to us and it was just
a bunch of old fisher people
who turned out to be from alabama.
one of them said to another,
“get him. he acts like he really owns this place,”
but it was just a public park,
and i felt like such a fool again.


remember how we sat in the tub
after acid, listening to the bubbles pop,
and you complained that
now we were good for nothing but
making andy warhol movies?
i was so glad to finally have
a bathroom equipped with all the latest
alternative press, the berkeley barb,
the berkeley tribe, the san francisco oracle;
but now i have
cucumber melon therapy
and poetry stacked so high
i cannot see the poems
for the trees.


behind tassajara

I

we made the steep,
rocky descent,
into the valley
that lay far below.
the monastery was
closed for silence,
but we walked through
and up the creek
where camper’s cupboards
were nailed to trees.

the next morning
we dropped acid
and climbed up to
a waterfall
carved out of a
large black boulder
with a slide
like snake skin
dropping into a
deep cold pond
hewed out of
the rock as well.

before we even
got to the fall
i went nuts
in the verdant rush
of eden, bright
peppermint and the
gurgling stream.
wild boars could have
been close by.

i threw off all
my clothes and hopped
from rock to rock.
ted came to me.
“you’re going to bust
your butt, “ he said,
and i got
back in line
at the falls there were
six of us,,,all naked.
three couples,
one of whom i
did not know.
the girl was a famous
rock star’s sister.

we tripped and swam
all day long.
i wrote poems
of one word each.
ROCK
WET
COLD

ted photographed me
as a savage in
the bushes, crouching.

when jeanne and i
climbed down together,
we did not know
whether we were
upstream or downstream
from the camp.
we looked at the stars.
one bright one seemed
to move away.

we found the camp
where someone had
left a ham steak
and asparagus
in a coffee can
in the stream.

that night the others
said they had
seen the star
disappear also.
i said, let’s call it
rock la fleche
after my boss at
the junior college;
and then it turned
out the rock
star’s sister was
rock’s secretary.

she told me about
asparagus...how a little bit
will taint your urine.
i had never noticed
that before. she said
the next time you are
having lunch at the
saint francis and there is
a piece of asparagus
on your salad,
eat it and then
pay attention
the next time you pee.

i told my family
about this and
we all noticed it
for the first time.
like the time my
sister-in-law gave me
what she said was
a vitamin pill,
and my urine turned blue,
and everybody
stared at me and
broke into laughter.

i made a terrible mistake.
i threw dried deer turds
on the fire. i had read
the early settlers did that.
(or maybe it was
the indians).
it made everybody
somewhat sick..

that was the time
the roach clip i
had found in berkeley
disappeared and
was never seen
again.

II

a day or so later
jeanne and i left
on a three day hike
over the mountains
to the coast.
the first night
in bear glade
was spooky,
lonely and dark.
the next day we
could hear a flute
up the path and
we followed it.

that night we camped
by a crowded creek,
and the next morning
in the early steam
we crept up
to a hot springs
about the size
of a large tub,
in a redwood
grove, so hot
we could just
barely stand it.

that day we met
a hippie who
hadn’t had
anything to eat
but brown rice
for days...
him nor his dog.
we gave them some figs
and some purple acid
i had got from
a friend of kevin’s
back in berkeley.

that night we camped
in big sur park
and someone gave us
a large box
of oatmeal. in
the evening there
was a marching band
in a meadow
almost like
yosemite.

we hitchhiked home
the next day
and got a ride
from a speed freak who
scared the living
daylights out of us
for a long time
after that.


we tripped at point reyes quite a lot, but mostly on the tamales bay side near elephant mountain. it was at dillon beach on the other side of tamales bay that i had first seen the pacific ocean when i was studying at the university of the pacific in 1961. now it was 1970. these were good times for jeanne and ted and me. jeanne worked as an editor, ted was still in graduate school at cal, and i mostly kept house and cooked and washed dishes and got into my ecology trip which included a lot of early recycling efforts. one time jeanne and i tripped in the hills and came upon founder’s rock which had a poster on it that read “clearance creekwater revival,” like creedence clearwater, the band. we went to an ecology action event, cleaning a creek, and watched stoned hippies fishing cigarette butts out of the stream. i got involved with the group and helped move an exhibit from san rafael to stockton. on the way, large nutria seemed to greet us all along the north bay shore. it was the first time i was in lodi. creedence had a song about being “stuck in lodi”.

i got a job at laney junior college in oakland and was teaching creative writing and composition when we took our trip to tassajara hot springs on spring break. the poem which covers that experience is just above. soon after that doug p. came to visit, and jeanne and i broke up, and i followed doug and his entourage into the mountains. i was gone with doug and his group for six or seven months before i returned to texas and then california.


another installment

i learned to eat
yogurt with fruit
about the same time
i lived with jeanne l.
another roommate,
ted c.,
fermented fruit,
peaches and plums,
and made his own yogurt
from powdered milk.
i think he made
his own granola
cereal in the
oven as well.
we would eat the
yogurt, cereal and
fruit together.
i learned to like it.

we lived in a large
apartment on
blake street
below grove
in berkeley.
at first jeanetta
j. lived there also;
she was a coordinator
for the american
poetry circuit.

when she moved out,
my friends debbie
and al moved in,
a jewish couple
from new york.
they never really
melded with
ted and jeanne
who were more
or less ivy
league

we dropped a lot of
acid and
went to point
reyes often.
they liked to trip
at tamales bay.
i got into
ecology and
organic gardening.
i started a small
compost heap
out back and that
was a source of
trouble. the landlord
found it and threw
a fit, so i moved it
to the garden in
a back yard
across the street
where i was growing
vegetables.
jeanne was scared
we would have to move.

about that time
doug p. came
to visit us
with gary k.
and kelsey h.,
and i ended up
quitting my job
at laney college
and leaving jeanne
to follow them
into the mountains.
it was early may
nineteen seventy,
and the kent state riots
had just happened.

we rode to eureka
and then headed inland
to the town of orleans
where we met walt
berry who owned
the godfrey ranch
north of the hoopa
indian reservation
at forks of the salmon
in siskiyou county.
we ended up
caretaking for him
for a couple of months
before we moved on
to portland, oregon.




doug and kelsey (the first part)

when doug and kelsey and gary k. arrived in berkeley, they had traveled all the way from cambridge, massachusetts, earlier in the spring. doug had already been hired as director of communications for a large canadian arts council. he had a commission to do a report on the state of the arts in north america. he was working on that in cambridge, massachusetts, that easter, 1970. what evolved was a multi-media project that spilled well over conventional bounds, and then they eventually traveled to canada to deliver the report and possibly begin work. however, when they arrived in canada, doug rejected the offer of the job. at that point he and kelsey, his former secretary, and gary, his assistant for a number of years, including at a major new york art museum, traveled across canada in a small car and visited anna h. in seattle where she was living with an experimental composer. anna had formerly been gary’s girl friend, and anna was jeanne l.’s best friend from college. doug and anna’s father, who had once been headmaster of a school in dallas, had founded a country day school on the east coast.

they came to visit jeanne and ended up taking me with them. it was the first time i had ever been that high on grass. i was also completely enchanted by doug’s work, however bizarre it may have been in places. i quit my job at laney junior college in oakland and merely hastened the break up of my relation with jeanne, which was already agreed upon, and followed doug out of the house on blake street, in that little car.

we drove straight to eureka on the northern california coast. we ate raw cashews on the way. in eureka we hung out at a coffee house and found a place to crash for the night with a strange fellow i hardly remember. most of us slept on the floor. we visited a religious commune headed up by a man named leon who took a shine to me and would have stolen me away from doug if doug had not alerted gary to keep a close eye on me. leon was a “christian” and would not let doug and kelsey stay together at night because they were not married. so we did not stay there at all. we stayed with the dude from the coffee house.

the next day we drove inland to willis or willits where we had pie and coffee and met a man whose wife was in the hospital and who took us to his small compound. at that point i did not know what to expect. i remember we were asked to say grace and apparently i was the only one who knew how, so i was accommodating. i slept in a room by myself.

the next day we headed for orleans where we met walt berry who let us crash in a tent on his property and then in the barn because of the rain. the godfrey ranch was like something out of heidi; an apple orchard in blossom led up the hill to the small ranch house. it was snowing when we got there...in early may.

we were like indentured servants. we repaired water lines and scraped ceilings and worked in the snow and occasionally were allowed in the house for coffee and cookies. walt got into a dispute with his wife and took her and their daughter april to san francisco. walt already had a broken arm from being thrown by his horse. he then got hepatitis and had to go south to recuperate. we inherited guardianship of the small godfrey ranch where we smoked and dropped and entertained passers by and generally had a very good time. just up the mountain was a hippie commune called black bear. i recently read on the internet that it’s still there today. there’s a movie about it. we never went up there, but i should have. that’s another example of places i just missed seeing, but wish i had.

walt came back on july 4, and we left shortly thereafter. the car was still running, and we drove to portland, oregon, spending a night camped out in a rest stop. in portland we found a deserted basement where we hid out for a few days. there was a little stove down there, but kelsey refused to cook under the circumstances. we ate yogurt and nuts and dates and figs. then we rented a two-bedroom unfurnished flat on water street in a hippie neighborhood largely cut off from the rest of town by freeways.

doug set up a desk and that’s where we started getting some serious work done again. i discovered dwight goddard’s a buddhist bible from the 1930’s. we copied out the book of the tao in pen and ink and made cardboard mountain cards with ink drawings. to some extent, doug introduced me to oriental art at that time.

one day we were high, (i hadn’t taken any acid that day) and this dude from across the street brought this dynamite smoking dope that was like acid; and gary and i got to flashing on brotherly jealousy and competition, and the room got dark as doug bartered with this guy like arabs in the desert; and after he was gone we didn’t know what we had smoked and stumbled across the street to ask. then doug disappeared into the bathroom and came out with a shaved head, and gary and i did the same. we all got in the empty tub and washed each other’s feet.

shunyata sonata

for the “dharma bums”

who picked beans in oregon
for 50 cents an hour
while the overseers
bootlegged wine
to the derelicts
who slept in bunks
in portland for
$2.00 a night,
while a squidgy-faced
old woman sat
on the steps of a slumlord
and laughed.

a sonic boom
shattered their high
as they stumbled out
into the streets,
stoned and dazed –
“nixon was coming...”.
their heads were shaved
and like antennae
picking up
every vibration
became aware
of f.b.i. listening devices
sprouting in the park
like the beans they ate
for salad late
at night, attuned
to the symphony
of sirens rising
near and far,
in city streets,
inside their heads.


we picked plums and sold them. we picked green beans in the fields. we tried to sell art. had a major dealer come for brunch. we did ink rubbings of manhole covers that became like great tibetan tankas. it was doug who first taught me the use of brush and ink. gary’s brother joel and his girlfriend tina came to visit. they had come to forks of the salmon earlier with brother jack who was on probation. we got paranoid and left with just what we could carry on our backs and hiked out the river, building a raft to cross an inlet, and entered washington state at longview near astoria. we took a bus to seattle where i rented a car on my amercan express (our original car had broken down finally in portland), and we drove across country with stops in montana (bull run), south dakota, and kent and salem, ohio. it was soon after the kent state shootings. doug knew a film professor at kent who had made a documentary on pornography in akron, ohio. we camped out in his apple orchard. but before ohio we stopped in whiting, indiana, a suburb of chicago, and picked up brother jack and brother bruce. doug (who had excellent credentials as an educator) got jack released into his custody. bruce was a friend of jack’s who just happened on us while we were smoking at jack’s and disappeared into the bathroom where i eventually found him with his head half-shaved; and i had to help him finish the job. then we crossed ohio and ended up in greensberg, pennsylvania, where we stayed in the house of the director of a county museum of art until gary and i found the house outside indiana, pennsylvania, where we spent indian summer until the weather got cold, and we were harassed by the locals (around halloween), and we moved into a largely abandoned three story house in pittsburg in a little culvert near some steel mills and began our sojourn there. brother bruce had disappeared from the farm house earlier. sister tina split and went back to chicago. finally, kelsey no longer wished to be a buddhist and went to stay in william meredith’s house in new london, connecticut...meredith, a famous poet and friend of doug’s from new york. doug eventually went after her. after he came back he seemed disturbed and finally forced me to leave, saying goodbye with a big kiss at the bus depot. brother joel had by then left as well. it may have been because of my strict interpretation of the prohibiton against intoxicants in a buddhist bible that i was ejected.

i took a bus back to chicago where brother joel and sister tina were living, and then i took a train to texas. i carried dwight goddard’s a buddhist bible and the tibetan book of the dead. i ate wheat germ all along the way. i was a buddhist monk. my mother bought me a wooden cup and bowl. i stayed in texas until after christmas, and then dad gave me two hundred bucks and a bus ticket to california where i hooked up with debbie and al for a while (al had become partner in a billiard parlor named max’s after the poet charles olson’s magnum opus, the maximus poems), and i was described as a refugee from an archie comic book (my hair was just growing back). i saw jeanne, and lived with my old landlady mrs. breslow up in the hills and went to l.a. twice, once to think about a movie on the life of the buddha, and once to help alice breslow’s aging mother at laguna beach. finally dad offered me a job, and i came back to texas and worked for the summer and dated m. n. in dallas until i hitchhiked back to california and started the next segment of my journey. amen.


they came down from further up the mountain
strange, haggard, gap-toothed faces
like nightmares out of the dark.
they asked if they could borrow our rifle.
(we were only caretakers there).
we had heard they ate young dogs.
we refused their request.
i was coming down off acid,
several days of dropping acid,
when my foot had become infected.
a thin red line was marching towards my groin.
kelsey gave me a whole bottle of vitamin c to chew,
the rose-hip flavored kind,
and we began to soak the foot in very hot water
boiled on the large wood-burning stove.
the infection had entered the sole in front of the heel,
and i began to feel armies of tiny warriors
begin to battle the poison back down my leg
until the wound opened and the poison poured out.
i was exhausted. i had been scared.
we were a long way from any real medical help.
i wrapped myself up in an army mummy sleeping bag
in the next room and lay real still.
i began to hallucinate...hooves, horns, bulls,
the etruscan book of the dead,
and i could hear doug and kelsey talking in the other room.
later a thundestorm broke and the garden
blossomed with abundant fertility.
i remember the squash.
we watched a flash of lightning strike in the valley
and smoke began to rise and then
airplanes dropped bags of water on the fire,
and we heard great clanking sounds
that turned out to be heavy equipment
moving up the mountain.
we thought it was world war iii and
the chinese with their dragons.
someone gave us a case of old c-rations from a distant war.
but we ate mostly rice and beans, fresh vegetables and figs
and drank coffee and lemon fir tea all summer
writing and drawing and getting to know
ourselves and each other.
it was totally mythological.
it was the forks of the salmon, california,
in the summer of 1970.

supposedly there was an article
in TIME magazine that summer
about the salmon river crowd.
william butler yeats wrote about
“the salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas”.
in “sailing to byzantium” which
i copied out that summer.

walt berry, who owned the godfrey,
came back about july 4th,
and doug decided it was time to split.
we drove north towards portland
and camped out in a rest stop for one night.

after we got to
portland, oregon,
we all became
buddhists and shaved
our heads except for
kelsey whose hair was
much too beautiful.
we adopted the scriptures,
a buddhist bible
edited by dwight
goddard in the
nineteen thirties,
the very book jack
kerouac had studied
and carried. we
undertook serious
meditation.

panicked by the
political times
we hiked out of town
with packs on our backs
along the wilamette
river until
we crossed over
into washington.
at one point we had
to build a raft.

we rented a car.
there were six of us then.
tina and joel had joined us again,
and drove across country
stopping in the middle
of the night at bull run.
we drove to hammond,
indiana, where
we picked up brothers
jack and bruce
and crossed ohio,
stopping at
kent and salem
until we got to
greensberg, penn-
sylvania where
we stayed with
a museum director
until gary and i
found the farm house
outside indiana,
pennsylvania,
when my long buddhist
poem begins.


when i was a buddhist
in pittsburg, pennsylvania,
in late 1970,
we reserved a room
at the student union,
the cathedral of learning,
at pitt university
in a suburb called oakland
to practice our meditation
and be available to students.
i can remember students lounging
in a dark room behind a glass wall
on wide carpeted bleachers
under the fluorescent glow
of a flickering tv.
they were like hot house flowers
in a refrigerated showcase...
exotic orchids on display.

upstairs we sat around a board
like a raft lit by candles,
set with flowers and tea.
we burned incense and chanted,
read holy scriptures
and entertained students
who were interested.
we did the same thing
at carnegie-mellon which
was just down the street.
and we read at the original
carnegie library where
the carnegie poet for the year
was william meredith,
later chancellor of the
american academy of poets,
a friend of our teacher.
he would become one of the
literary executors of w. h.
auden’s estate, along with
my old teacher, monroe spears.
meredith would come to dinner
at our house on mackey street
to eat beans and rice and salad
with apple butter for dessert,
from apples we gleaned
from orchards no
longer commercial.

it was november after
indian summer spent
in christmas tree county
outside indiana,
pennyslvania, jimmy
stewart’s home town,
where we begged an old farm house
and collected food stamps
and prayed and studied
homer and shakespeare,
and went off into the woods
when the moon was full
and witnessed
otherworldly chinese gardens
of mushrooms in many
shapes and colors and
fern like ground cover,
phosphorescent moonscapes,
where one day i saw
three living things
each as though made
of green apple jade:
a spider
a beetle
and a small snake...

and the large green apples
we would eat with cheese
hung from the tree where
the dappled gray mare
munched and whizzed
behind our house
and we wandered off
into bardo land
for forty-nine days
and were all essentially
reborn.


back in berkeley the following year, i tripped once in the spring of 1971 with a kid i met at a political rally. i ended up at a buddhist church in the east bay, nichiren shoshu, and learned their chant at that time. i finally came back to texas for the summer where i worked for dad and dated m. n. then i hitchiked to berkeley from texas and lived at the frog house or the family frog with jane and bob s. and their collection of kids and people until i met laurie x. and went to live with her for a while before we tried an experimental marriage that failed; and i moved in with nora kornell, an older berkeley woman who operated rooming houses, who took me in; and i stayed with nora about a year before i moved to san francisco for a few months, became severely depressed and eventually returned to texas and therapy. by then i was finished with psychedelics, although i took a few more trips years apart and finally quit altogether.


chapter six

in september of 1971 i had been working for dad, more or less as his secretary, most of the summer. i dated m. n. in dallas. i had known her a little even before my senior year at rice... she dated a student who was a class behind me at college. i hooked up with m. n. in the summer of 1971 through maurine b. maurine was an elderly woman in her 70’s who audited courses at rice. we first met in spears “pound , eliot and auden” course. later we sat together in louis mackey’s “aesthetics” course. i remember i scandalized some people because i didn’t take notes in that course, at least not to speak of. i probably didn’t understand it very well. i know i didn’t make much of an impression on mackey. i ended up using heidigger to explain abstract expressionism, and he didn’t find it a very valid argument. if it hadn’t been for my pull with dr. o’grady, i might have done very poorly with mackey. i only got a b grade anyway. later dr. mackey and i would have a problem because of penny (p.j.).

but to get back to maurine . i was occasionally a dinner guest at maurine’s. she lived in memorial addition in a cul-de-sac.. in early summer of 1971 a friend from my parents’ adolescence, jerri reidy, was getting remarried in memorial. jerri was fairly recently widowed by the death of her husband bill who had been my father’s best friend in high school. bill and jerri actually introduced my parents to each other. when my mother went away to college, jerry rented my mother’s room at my grandparents’ house in highland park. she was a wonderful woman, private secretary to gus wortham, after whom the wortham center is named in houston. in the late 80’s when i was living in houston, jerri was very good to me. her second marriage had not worked out, and we spent a lot of time together. so, mother , dad and i went to her wedding in 71, and while i was there i visited with maurine who told me that m. n. was working in dallas. i called her up and we went out and began seeing each other on weekends. it developed into a serious romance sometime after the fourth of july, and we actually became engaged temporarily, but never publicly. i went into a severe panic condition, due largely to the fact that i didn’t have a real job or any prospect for one, and also the fact that i felt trapped (not by m. n., but by the situation). i began feeling that i was in some kind of unendurable hell. it was august. about that same time some friends from new york (debbie and al) stopped by on their way back to california and got me very high on some very powerful hash. i decided to go back to california, and since dad was having a rough enough time as it was, i didn’t ask him for any help. i decided to hitchhike, which i did. i told m. n. goodbye. it was a rather stormy scene or series of scenes. i waited while i got through a brief bout with some kind of summer flu, completed an unusually good series of pen and ink drawings, one of which i still have a print of from a magazine and will include it eventually, and had my younger brother take me out to the highway north of town where i left with only a few things wrapped up in a blue jean jacket, a pair of cowboy boots and a large brimmed hat.


you’re killing us all,
grandmother said,
sitting in her regal chair,
but the whole situation
is killing me,
i replied,
killing me,
just killing me,
i complained,
standing, holding
the screen door open

these heels are killing me,
achilles complained,
surveying the killing fields
of troy. he had
achilles tendencies.


the first ride to pick me up was a construction worker on his way to a job site outside of wichita falls. he had some pot and we got high. somewhere after wichita falls, maybe not the next ride, but soon nonetheless, i was picked up by an old cowboy who was on his way back to california from arkansas. he had been married a number of times and traveled back and forth between arkansas and california several times. this was extreme good fortune, because i now had a ride all the way to california. we took turns driving and ate baloney sandwiches and never did completely stop until we got to red bluff, north of sacramento. i remember one time we slowed down to look at some other hitchhikers, but he was only interested in picking up women after he already had me along, and we never did pick anyone else up until we were in the nevada desert. we passed through las vegas during the day and did not stop. but on the way between las vegas and reno our car broke down. there appeared to be a filling station just down the road, but that turned out to be a mirage. eventually a large limousine stopped with a number of very large women who were apparently headed to some kind of a house of ill repute, although i almost wondered later if they might not have been men in drag. they were able to help us somewhat, and we got back on the road soon after that. somewhere in the desert we picked up a middle-aged couple that were headed to reno. they sat in the back seat and giggled and made out quite a bit. they knew fort worth rather well, and we talked about various places; but i didn’t know a lot about their world of honkytonks and country western places, and of course they didn’t know my world of country clubs and suburban comfort. we let them out in reno, and the old cowboy seemed real impressed with how much love there seemed to be between the two of them, even in their difficult circumstances. they were looking for work in reno.

we drove on to red bluff where i visited briefly with his friends at their house, and then he set me on the freeway where i hitched down to the bay area. i had a couple of rides, but nothing terribly unusual. i was debating whether to look up my old girl friend, jeanne l., in berkeley first, or my former roommate in san francisco, peter v. i ultimately decided to look for jeanne.

jeanne was not at home when i first arrived. she was at work. i wandered down to the campus where i ran into ariel parkinson, tom parkinson’s wife, tom the famous radical professor of english, crossing campus carrying a painting she had just picked up from the framer’s. ariel was an accomplished artist. she told me that tom was in his office and that i should go to see him. i did. i was a little depressed at that point and seemed somewhat emotional to him, and he told me they couldn’t have me wandering about the campus in that condition, and i told him i would be ok.

that evening i hooked up with jeanne. i spent one night at jeanne’s. the next day she took me to some former neighbors of hers on irwin court, bob and jane s. bob was in the kitchen preparing dinner for them, their three children, and the hangers on who lived around their small compound. we were invited to stay for salad, but not for the full meal. jane was in the bathroom with one of the children. when we all finally sat around the large wooden spool table on cushions, jeanne proceded to tell jane that i was looking for a place to stay. i had some weed i had bought from one of jeanne’s neighbors, and i was making myself agreeable by smoking a good bit of it. jane responded that i could stay there for a while. she mentioned that i might help keep her amused. i initially camped out in a tool shed at the far reach of their property, a rented house with several outlying buildings, all of which were inhabited. the second night jane told me that i didn’t have to sleep in the shed, and i slept in the house.

one of the men, silas, i think, who shared the garage with another man named ben, built me a loft bed in the living room from which perch i could see into the kitchen at night where the only light was left on. i could keep an eye on the refrigerator for jane. i was responsible for helping to look after their three children. i contributed my food stamps and was allowed to live there in exchange. jane and bob had come out from pittsburg where bob had been an anti-war protester and burned his draft card.

this situation only lasted a few weeks until halloween, 1971. i was somewhat in love with jane and felt very conflicted about the situation. their children attended an experimental elementary school adjoining the berkeley campus in what had once been an episcopal church. there was a young woman named laurie who lived in the apartment over the garage that was part of that property. she was officially the drama teacher. we all inhabited different fantasy worlds at that time. it was halloween, and there had been a picnic up in the hills. that evening laurie was rolling giant marijuana cigarettes the way she had learned to in london. she seemed to be attaching herself to me.

that night we all went to a party in the oakland ghetto where prostitutes and pimps and people on welfare, (some of the families of the children in the kilamanjaro school which was established especially for such families), were partying so heavily in the dining room it was impossible to get inside. you could only hear the loud clapping and hollering and stomping and knew that something wild was going on. at one point i went upstairs with some of the children whose faces were smeared with candy, and they took me to a bare room with wooden slats for a floor where there was a giant heap of candy, and they were dancing around it like wild indians.

back downstairs, i had taken a hit of acid, my first since the previous spring when i took a hit in golden gate park with the young man i had met at an anti-war rally. i was laughing rather uncontrollably, when laurie snuggled up next to me and said she recognized the acid giggles. we began making out, and for some reason, possibly because she was a little plump, i asked her if she happened to be pregnant. she replied, “no, but i’d like to be”. that was the beginning of another episode. that night we walked home under a full moon, and laurie slept with me in my loft while i talked to jane who was down on the floor with a sick child. jane was disturbed because she had heard i was unhappy and wanted to move out, and i told her that laurie wanted me to move into the cabin with her, and that was what happened. the next day i moved.

i should mention here that i had also had a brief affair during that period with a young woman i met through a man i had met at jeanne’s. he was tall and good-looking and blond and i was attracted to him, but nothing ever actually happened. i met a female neighbor of his who also knew jane and bob. we slept together a few times, and i remember that we did not use any protection, and later there was some question as to whether or not she might have got pregnant by me. she discounted the likelihood of the child’s being mine, and said that she knew that laurie and i were trying to have a child (which we were), and that she didn’t want to cause us any trouble. later after laurie and i had broken up, i went back to look for that girl, whose name i cannot even remember, and found the place where she had been living, but no one was certain whether she had another child or not. if she did, and if it was mine, that was almost certainly the only child i ever fathered. i have wondered about it through the years and fantasized the child finding me. the girl did know my name at the time and that i had been a student at the university; so it was and still is a possibility, however remote. that child would be over thirty-five years old today.

that was four women i was with in about a two week period, and nothing like that had ever happened before and nothing like that ever happened again. it must have been the dope, or the rush after hitchhiking all the way from texas to california. i’m not especially proud of it. it was all very irresponsible, and i would never do anything like that again.
i might add it was more than a decade before the onset of aids.

brother joel, the brother of gary k., both of whom were part of my initial travels with doug p., eventually became a moonie. i have heard that part of the induction process into the moonie organization is a complete written sexual confession. to some extent this effort, especially what will follow, mimics that procedure. it will be hard to remember everything that happened, and something of an embarrassment for me to relate it; but i will do the best i can to be faithful and honest, although it is also part of my intention to obscure the names of those who might be unhappy to be so exposed. for now, i will tell it fairly straight.

laurie lived in the cabin adjoining the school which also doubled as an office. it had two narrow day beds, a bath and a kitchen. she already had a young undergraduate woman living with her who occupied one of the beds. laurie and i slept on the other. there was never any inappropriate action between the other young woman and myself or between her and laurie, who was herself bi-sexual like myself, although i don’t think either of us knew that about the other when we first met and got together. laurie and i smoked dope, drank beer and made love a great deal, especially at night. we frequented the coffee bars and small restaurants on the berkeley campus’s northside near the intersection of hearst and euclid. we babysat for a cocaine dealer and sometimes we made love there as well. i can only remember taking acid once during that initial period in the cabin which lasted for about three months. it was on the day of some kind of a craft sale, and i remember women coming in the cabin to try on different clothes; and i remember giving a hit of acid to a woman whose husband was the head of the parents’ group that ran the school, and later we walked up holy hill which was adjacent to the school and watched the spectacular sunset. that woman eventually had a sex therapy talk show on the radio in berkeley in the early 80’s.

laurie and i hoped to have a child and go on welfare ourselves and be a part of that community in which we had met. we didn’t just want the baby to go on welfare. i had no children and laurie really wanted one. it seemed like a good opportunity. we are fortunate, i think, that it never happened. but at some point i suggested we have a wedding ceremony to regularize our efforts, although by then we were not in an exclusive relationship. actually we were exclusive in the heterosexual sense (as far as i know), but both by then had had homosexual liasons. mine commenced one night when laurie and some of her gay friends took us to a bar, the midnight sun, on castro street. that was my first exposure to what was actually going on in san francsico at the time. i had frequented a bar called the rendezvous in my early berkeley days, but had avoided contact with open homosexuality for years because it seemed like such a disordered and undesireable lifestyle. but that night, laurie was having her period and did not want to have sex, and i met a man named monte and brought him home with us; and for some time, in fact for years, after that i saw monte from time to time. he was a good looking, husky guy from idaho who worked part time in a bank and part time for a pizzaria. when laurie and i did eventually have our wedding ceremony (i should tell you right now that there was no license) monte was my best man. laurie’s parents came out from new york.. they took the wedding as seriously as they could. laurie had been so disturbed in recent years that at one point they had had to go to london to bring her home. their main concern was that she not use any more acid, and while we were together she did not; although after we broke up, she did again and ended up in a mental hospital briefly.

the wedding was a big deal. my parents and younger brother came as well, but when they found out that there was no license and that laurie and i were not really in love in the conventional sense, they went home before the ceremony. it happened nonetheless. it was a checkered affair with lots of hippies. debbie and al from blake street were there. peter v. was there. there was a black white magician and a white black magician who performed the ceremony. there was another couple that also took vows. although we did not vow exclusive faithfulness in the sexual sense, we did promise to love and care for each other for the rest of our lives; and to my mind i have never quit caring for laurie. she just no longer wants anything to do with me, and i can’t really blame her. she lives in oregon now, as far as i know.

we honeymooned in the sierra nevada and at yosemite. it was winter. on the return trip we stopped off at a commune above yosemite where we visited pam m. from my very first acid days. when we got back to berkeley, we were evicted and never really found a place to live together again. laurie was able to stay with friends of hers that dated back to her new jersey days, and i was taken in by nora kornell who did not want a couple staying with her. laurie never got pregnant (at least not until years later), became a prominent street person, and introduced me to a lot of unusual characters, like groovy and sunday and much. at one point she freaked out and had to go to a state hospital, and eventually left berkeley to go to oregon where her parents bought her a house where we visited a few times over the next year or so, and where i last saw her in the spring of 1973 shortly before i returned to texas. we have spoken some on the phone, but not since spring 74, and she refuses all overtures now, and her parents were very powerful people who could choose to take revenge on me for the whole episode if they so chose. there is a great deal more to say about that peiod. many characters. many adventures. i will continue with them as soon as i am able. it makes me a little sick to talk about it.


laurie had lots of gay friends. i remember a couple named tom and abraham. one night laurie and i were invited to a party on newbury street, i think it was, not far from ashby and grove or shattuck. it was a very wild affair where the host wore a negligee and often exposed himself to his guests. i think they were architects. there was a lot of dope and alcohol and a lot of people. i don’t remember taking acid. i may have done some cocaine that night, but anyway i ended up in a compromising situation with tom of tom and abraham, and after that i could not find my peach pit wedding ring which was one of the set laurie and i had worn since our wedding. laurie seemed particularly upset that i had lost that ring. it was highly polished to look like tiger skin.

that was the night i met george m. george was an older, somewhat portly man with a great beard and a very jovial attitude. he had a large house down below grove street, three stories, with a parapet terrace above the third floor where he liked to sunbathe and entertain. i began spending a good bit of time with george. we called his house strawberry fields because he was always burning strawbetty incense and wore strawberry oil in his beard. i called nora kornell’s great redwood house, designed by julia morgan who was a principle architect of san simeon, “plum nothing”, because at times of the year there was nothing to eat around there but the plums that grew everywhere.

on one occasion laurie and i ended up in an orgy at george’s that involved a number of people. one of the men there turned out to be an acquaintance of p.j.’s from buffalo. i flashed on his knowing her and asked to make contact with her, and laurie saw that i was still in love with p.j., and i think from that moment on laurie never really had much faith in our relationship. why should she have? except that it is 37 years later and i still care about her, but understand that she no longer wants anything to do with me. she’s hardly alone in that. i can list a number of women who feel that way, including p.j. and linda j. who lives here in fort worth and has threatened to contact the authorities if i ever try to have contact with Her again.

laurie also had two friends d. and p. who had an infant son p. and laurie knew each other from new jersey. d. was a fellow texan from abilene. we spent a lot of time with them, and laurie would stay with d. and p. after we were evicted from the school. when laurie freaked out on acid in oakland and went to the state hospital, i borrowed p. and d.’s child and took him to the state hospital where i passed him off as laurie’s and said that he needed his mother. i was able to spring laurie, but she refused to speak to me all the way home from napa valley where the state hospital is located. soon after that she took up with somebody else and then left for oregon. we were together the night before she left, at nora’s house; and i had a radio gig on the student station that morning at 3 a.m. and wanted laurie to stay, but she left hitchhiking, had some adventures, and resurfaced in portland, oregon. we visited there and then at cannon beach, but we were never really together again after berkeley.

i last saw d. and p. in austin in december of 1972. d. was trying to be a writer. a rice friend came to visit me while i was at their house and that was where he finally admitted to having had an affair with p.j. we all got very high on dope and i played with his head a little bit aggressively, and i have never seen him since. he was putting together a magazine at the time, but since i wrote almost exclusively poetry, or made efforts in that direction, and was also extremely disordered, i never really had much to offer that magazine.

after laurie left berkeley in april or may of 72, i applied for readmission to the university, i began to float loans and took a job at the moti mahal indian restaurant as a dishwasher. i had also worked as a dishwasher at a health food restaurant in san francisco. the moti mahal was a fascinating place just off telegraph avenue. i worked there about six months, hung out at the stud bar in san francsico, lived with nora most of the time and then got a basement level room in what we called the blue palace where jeanne l. had been living since my return to california in september, 1971. i had an affair with a travel agent named ron about that time whom i had met at the white horse tavern just across the oakland line on telegraph. ron and i stayed in touch for a while after i returned to texas, but we never saw each other again. he drove a nice sports car, traveled a lot and at one point sold me a ticket to india on which i ended up getting a refund because i just didn’t have quite enough money to survive the trip and get back home. that’s the closest i ever got to india. but i worked at the moti mahal and studied a little sanskrit with a pundit for a very short period of time and tried to pursue an interdisciplinary degree in rock and roll. and came damn close to getting it, if i hadn’t got so sick, before i came home finally. i was going to a lot of concerts, was a converted deadhead, liked hot tuna and copperhead which were spin offs from the airplane and quicksilver, had lovers in san francisco, and eventually moved to the city in january of 73 which started off well enough but degenerated into depression and suicidal thinking that eventually left me homeless in berkeley and having to be rescued, which i was, first by nora and then by my father and then by psychiatry and finally by religion and the love of God which lifted all of that and this off of me and makes me wonder if i should even be telling this story.


sunset boulevard berkeley style

nora kornell was not norma desmond, but she was sixty when i first met her in january 1972. she was still powerful, beautiful and vital, with a great head of long auburn hair beginning to fade to gray. she was missing an eye, but she looked at you so directly that you hardly noticed that one eye was glass. i was walking down regent street, a comfortable tree-lined street in south berkeley, just east of telegraph avenue and just a few blocks south of the berkeley campus. i was babysitting that day, the four-year-old son of a friend of mine. nora was coming out of her house, a large imposing redwood plank structure, when she stopped us on the street to remark on what a beautiful child paul was. he had the face of an angel and curly blond hair. she asked if he was mine and i told her, no, that i was just babysitting. she asked about my situation. i told her about laurie and myself, and that we had been living in the kilamanjaro school office on northside, but that we had been forced to move and were staying with friends farther down regent street. laurie had a place to move to, but i did not.

nora told me to come back at five or six that evening and we would talk. i did and she took me into her large fire-damaged house and showed me an upstairs corner room that looked down on the garden and said i could stay there for now and help her with moving things and sawing wood for the fireplace. there was no electricity or running water in the house at the time. she cleared a place and lowered a single bed and then showed me a cabinet where there was chocolate and peanut butter. then she took me to a house on the other end of regent street where she rented out rooms and where her aging father lived. there she told me we could use the bathroom and clean up and shower. she did not actually own that house, but leased it and sublet rooms. i was allowed to store food and cook in that house as well.

nora owned another house on blake street, but at that time i was rarely involved in the blake street operation. it was a rooming house as well. it took a while for me to realize that i had met nora before. when i was living with jeanne in late 1969 and early 1970, we had gone in a small shop on university avenue and bought a small paper dragon that scooted across the floor when you pulled a string. in the course of moving boxes for nora, i discovered a box full of those dragons and then it came back to me, i had met nora before.

nora had a great large bedroom across the hall from my room, but she rarely slept there. there was a working phone, however, and it was in that room. i remember finding a copy of joyce’s finnegan’s wake in that room that had once belonged to thomas parkinson, my principle professor in graduate school at berkeley some years earlier. there were cracked walnuts and tangerine peel around the bed. nora told me once that she liked to eat an apple before going to bed.

but nora slept in a corner of the big downstairs living room near the fireplace. she could keep her eye on the whole house from there, and her german shepherd puppies slept with her. the female was named indira after indira gandhi, and i forget the male’s name, but i
would sometimes see him roaming around campus, as i well might see nora’s father strolling or reading a newspaper. as a matter of fact, when i first met nora i might have thought she was homeless had she not been coming out of that strange house. she had the dogs in a two-tone blue 1956 studebaker president that was parked out front under the plum trees, and i might have thought she was living in the car if i did not find out better right away. a year or so later i bought that car from nora’s youngest son, darius b., whose father had been an english professor at the university; and i drove the car to oregon at least once and only gave it up after it had been stolen in the spring of 1973 and was so badly damaged i gave it to a young man who befriended me in the northern california town of gualala.

i was almost 27 when i met nora kornell. there was a subterranean current of romance between us, but nothing overt ever took place. she was a kind of mother figure. she took me in, gave me a job, fed me and housed me, and sometimes gave me money so i could go to a concert, usually “the grateful dead”. nora symbolized california for me; as far as i was concerned, she was california. and i have just heard today that nora is dead, dead at age 92 in 2004...dead as i almost had turned sixty myself, thinking about her, trying to write to her, getting no answer. we last saw each other in 1984 when nora took me in again and gave me shelter. working for nora was like working for an old zen master; the work did not always make a lot of sense, but there was wisdom in it, something to be learned. she made great coffee, she could roast a great chicken, her omelets were excellent and i especially remember drinking can after can of grape juice with her in the early eighties. when we parted she asked for some money, money i did not have at the time, but i gave her what i could and promised her the rest. she wrote once to ask for it, but by the time i had the money to send her she did not answer. i found her son darius on the internet and was able to establish contact with him. i got emotional tonight thinking about her, how wonderful she was and how wonderfully good she was to me. i had hoped to see her one more time. if i had only known two years ago, i would have found a way to go see her. God bless her and keep her safe in heaven. i’m a fairly liberal christian. i believe we will meet again.


gerry george, deadhead

i remember exactly when i first became a deadhead, not the exact date, but the precise occasion. it must have been in late winter, early 1972. i was 27 years old and living in berkeley, california. i had just come out of my brief experimental marriage to laurie x. and was living with nora kornell in her old redwood plank house on regent street near the university campus, the house that had been designed by julia morgan, the same architect who was largely responsible for the hearst castle at san simeon.

laurie was still hanging at hardcastle’s coffee house in berkeley with her friends groovy and much and sunday. sunday didn’t hang around that long; she left for seattle and wrote back as a christian, warning us all about the dangers we were in. hardcastle’s was where i gave goldfinger, the painthead with gold flecks all over his nose, my beige felt cowboy hat, the one i had borrowed from my younger brother and hitchhiked out from texas with. it was pulled down and reshaped by days in the rain into a real hippie hat.

laurie insisted that i show up for a grateful dead concert at winterland about that time. i did. i went with monte j., my best friend at the time and best man at laurie’s and my hippie wedding. there had been no license. it was a checkered affair. we were married by a white black magician and a black white magician: mark de frates and v.g. hale.

that night at the dead i wore the white satin (knights in...etc.) chinese robe that laurie had given me for my birthday, the one with the red and gold dragons embroidered all over the back. so it must have been after february 1, 1972. monte and i got high in the rafters, and i saw laurie on the floor of the hall with a baby carriage. she was babysitting as usual and had brought her work with her to the concert. and then there was groovy, handing out something. i hurried down to the floor and asked groovy what it was. orange sunshine, he replied, hurry, take one before they are all gone. i did.

soon i was coming on strong. the new riders of the purple sage were just coming off stage in their flashy new satin country western duds. i wandered down one of the ramps behind the stage where i started to dissolve on acid. monte was so disgusted he left. then i went up under the balcony also behind the stage and took off my jean jacket, my work boots and electric blue socks grandmother had bought me in dallas, and my magenta flowered hippie shirt. in just my wide-wale blue corduroy bell-bottoms, which i had borrowed from my room at nora’s (they must have belonged to one of her three sons), with the macrame belt i had bought from a craftsman down at the embarcadero, and the white satin robe, i began to dance with the other hippies in the corner near the stage. i had left my wallet and i.d. in my jacket. i became something else, something altogether different. i became a new version of gerry george. i became gerry george, deadhead.

there was a beautiful young man writhing against the wall. there was a half-naked woman wallowing in the beer and trash on the floor. there were people quoting prices on pounds of weed and hundred lots of acid. it was like some kind of drug stock exchange. winterland seemed to have been built to accomodate a rodeo as well as the ice capades. the dead were on stage. jerry was singing their new hit, “sugaree,” “when they come to take you down, shake that thing, sugaree,” or something like that. the crystal ball in the ceiling began to reflect rays of color everywhere as they went into “the wheel.” “big wheel turning and you can’t let go; you can’t speed up and you can’t slow down.” i knew i was witnessing the debut of real hits. these were the songs that would be featured on jerry’s first solo album of about that time. i felt that i had finally arrived.

strange things were happening on stage. a man was brought up wrapped up in tape like a mummy. later i found out that this was a standard dead road crew prank. i thought i heard something about how this man had just got out of folsom prison. the sheriff of san francisco was there. the whole room was quarantined, and we were told that when we left we would automatically be registering for the california marijuana initiative. the room became a space ship and we went into orbit. they had found somebody’s wallet. i had lost my identity.
i thought it would go on forever, but it didn’t. suddenly the lights came up, the walls opened onto the street, and the room was full of california farm boys reveling in their youth and strength. i felt very old, ancient indeed. later someone would ask me in a car how old i was. i was just 27 years old. i went back to my clothes. i put on gerry george’s boots and gerry george’s jacket and gerry george’s wallet (it was still there), but i was no longer really gerry george. i was somebody else, inhabiting gerry george’s identity. i had been transformed. or perhaps as the atf agent would later say after the hollocaust at the branch-davidian compound outside waco (a la jim jones whose people’s temple was not far from winterland), i had been “consumed”.

outside in the cold fog i found groovy and much, and we started to hitchhike back to berkeley with stephen and beverley and karen. we were picked up by a man who stopped at a korean bar in north beach where we were almost shanghaied before we got picked up by the toy maker from telegraph avenue in his station wagon. we knew him. back in berkeley i crept up to my room in the darkness where for just a minute i thought nora was in my room, but it turned out to be just a heap of clothes. i feel asleep, tripping. i had heard the dead a number of times, but i had never been a deadhead before.


the garden of earthly delights

he had dropped a half tab of orange sunshine in the afternoon. it wasn’t that strong. he called his old girl friend in buffalo, the one he was so fixated on. he just happened to have obtained her number from another buffalo student in berkeley. she seemed annoyed that he had called at all. he tried hard to engage her in the conversation, but suddenly she hung up. he called back, but her roommate answered and said, “i don’t know what happened, she just ran out the front door.” he shrugged it off. it was almost time for his date.

he drove up into the hills. it was already dark as his classic blue studebaker pulled into a parking spot outside the garden apartment. he did not know the woman well. they were friends from the avenue. but she was quite attractive. her auburn coloring went well with his. he was glad she had agreed to go out with him. they were headed to “the garden of earthly delights,” a small rock and roll club in a warehouse district south of market street in san francisco. he had heard good reports about it and was anxious to go there.

the glass apartment door was partly open as he approached and knocked. no one answered. the apartment was dark except for a light coming from a room deep in the interior. he could hear a stereo playing “the low spark of high heeled boys” by traffic as he stepped into the dim living room where nonetheless he was surprised to make out a full-size framed reproduction of heironymous bosch’s bizarre tryptich “the garden of earthly delights” above the mantle. he could hardly fail to notice the coincidence. he had seen the original in madrid a few years earlier.

he followed the music to the lighted room where he knocked on the door frame and looked inside. fran looked up from a desk and spoke to him. she was finishing a counterfeit paper she was writing for hire. her face was beautiful but corrupt. she was wearing black lipstick. momentarily she was ready to go, and they left to drive across the bay bridge in search of the club. they smoked a little marijuana along the way.

the fog was rolling in as they made their way among streets with states’ names…texas, mississippi, ohio…streets almost devoid of signs of life except for the hulking warehouses that lurked in the shadows. then, through the dense mist they began to see a neon sign that read “garden of earthly delights”. they parked and made their way into the crowded bar which extended for considerable length down to the stage area where a loud band was playing rock and roll and people were dancing.

making a u-turn at the dance floor, they found an anonymous looking room, well-lit, where people were sitting around yellow formica-topped breakfast tables with matching plastic chairs drinking pitchers of beer. the tables reminded him of the table at which his family had eaten their meals when he was growing up . the people at these tables looked like drug dealers and probably were.

they found a little table near the dance floor and ordered a couple of drinks. he didn’t remember anything after that. (what follows is a fantasy. i didn’t actually lose the car until the next year, but i really don’t remember exactly what happened.) years later it would remind him of waking up after his colonoscopy. he remembered nothing. he woke up in a small rented room above the bar, and fran was gone and so was his car. he hitchhiked back to berkeley and never saw either fran or the car again.

he went back to the garden apartment, but the door was locked; and peering inside, he could no longer make out the tryptich. he reported the car missing, but since he had only paid $100 for it to the son of a landlady he had met on the street, he let it go. he began to wonder if it had ever even happened, and there was some doubt if it actually had.

strangely enough, a few years later he was back in texas and the girl from the phone conversation was by then in san francisco. he had managed to get in touch again. he asked her how she was doing. she said she had been up late the night before…had been to a nightclub. he asked her, “was it the garden of earthly delights?” it was.


munchkin

ran into much one night
at hamburger mary’s
down on folsom street.
he was all dressed up
like raggedy andy on crutches
with angel wings.
just another raggamufiend
hanging out with all the other
studmuffins from the stud bar
across the street in san francisco
for thirsty night study hall.
i took him home to stay with me
for a couple of weeks
until he got over his hepatitis.
he came back a few weeks later
and paid my rent for a month
with the money he got
from his atd, aid to the totally disabled
which he almost certainly was.


one time i was coming back from oregon where i had been visiting laurie. i was hitchhiking out of cannon beach when a car stopped all at once. right then i noticed a strange little gnome-like creature just up the road that was running our way. we got in the car with four young men from washington state who were on a lark on their way to san francisco. as we traveled along, they were passing a jug of fruit punch around, and i had some clear gelatin squares of acid my friend had taken in trade for a jungle gym he made for a children’s playground. he had gotten a hundred hits and i had two. i asked if they wanted me to put one in the punch. they replied “does a bear shit in the woods?” oddly enough, apparently, the hit of acid did not dissolve, because i seemed to be the only one who got off on it. it became obvious when we stopped by the coast and my soul soared among the clouds and one of the men said he’d seen someone else do that. he told me if i was ever on the big island in hawaii to go to the village of captain cooke and ask for vince something. he would show me where the good mushrooms were. i never really forgot that name.

later we passed through the agricultural inspection station as we entered california and asked about a place to camp. we were directed to a spot down the road near the ocean. it was a dark cove with lots of eucalyptus trees. as the others fell asleep, it fell on me to keep the fire going. i was scared to let it go out. i imagined rednecks in the woods, a la “easy rider”, and i had to go out into the darkness for fresh wood. i began to see alligators crawling into camp even though it was northern california or oregon. there were acrobatic gorillas appearing in the darkened trees as well, as in an escher print and as on jungle gyms. i stayed up all night until morning finally came and the others stirred, and i got a little sleep before we left. we had built our fire in a hubcap.

the next day we were in the redwoods national forest on the humboldt river and everything was paradisial. we swam in the warm sunshine and enjoyed the experience immensely. when we arrived in san francisco, i directed them to north beach and then i hitched out broadway to berkeley and back to nora’s, who had a pot of soup on when i arrived and made coffee. it was good to be back at nora’s. i could have stayed at laurie’s and had a chance to work in the woods, but i was secure at nora’s and enjoyed still being in berkeley.

i had hitchhiked out from texas the previous september. i was planning to go back to graduate school in an inter-disciplinary program to study the phenomenon of rock and roll culture as a religious or spiritual alternative. it all fell apart the following year, after working as a dishwasher in an indian restaurant and living at the blue palace off deakin and prince streets, and then moving to san francsico and running out of money and losing my apartment and car and the election i had entered for student body president. it was all too much for me. i became homeless temporarily and was just pulling out of a severe depression when my father convinced me to come to texas if only for the weekend, and i didn’t go back to california for a year, and then only to get some of my things and see p.j., who was living there by then. i was back once overnight in the late 70’s and then spent about nine months there in 1984. i visited the california desert after my time in new mexico in 1992, but only had one night in san francisco before i had to come back home.


an encounter with an ark

i dropped guy off at the entrance to wheeler ranch, a commune north of san francisco. i traded him a little pot for a couple of hits of acid. the kid riding next to me was a former hare krishna. i don’t remember his name. we were in my old two-tone blue 1956 studebaker president, the one i had bought from nora kornell, my landlady-guru in berkeley. nora appeared to be living in it with her two german shepherd pups when i met her, even though she owned several pieces of property and rented out rooms to students. the kid and i dropped the acid and headed for the nearby coast.

as we approached the edge of the plateau overlooking the ocean i noticed a parking place beside the road next to an outcropping. i pulled over. we got out. there was a dead sheep beside the parking place. climbing up to a knoll we found a strange grassy area with several bones, and in the center was this amazing object. it was bleached driftwood in the shape of a great war club. it had a long curved round handle, about the size of a broomstick. the head was a great knob of a bowl that made it look like a large pipe. one could almost have drilled a hole up the stem to make a wonderful ceremonial pipe. i called it “the devil’s fingerbone”. it reminded me of triton’s horn. i imagined that we had stumbled on a hell’s angels burial site, one where maybe the grateful dead had once played or maybe where one of them had been buried. it seemed sacred and scary at the same time. i was afraid to disturb it, but i did. i took the strange object as a symbol of power and returned to the car.

at the time i was in my late 20’s with long brown hair and a full beard and moustache. i wore a large corduroy coat that i had carried since my buddhist days a few years before. i had been given the coat by brother jack. in the pocket was a small but precious king james bible with fine leaves and a gold embossed cover. i had taken it from nora’s and used to keep it in the pick compartment of my guitar case. it had an aura of sanctity about it to which i was attached. my sidekick was younger and blond, sturdy and silent. we just barely knew each other.

we got back into the car and drove down near the water. i parked the car and we climbed down to a secluded beach. first i noticed a dead seabird in a crevasse. then i saw one of the most remarkable things i have ever seen. balanced on two rocks where the gentle waves were lapping on the shore, and where the runoff from a waterfall from a cliff ran into the sea, was a large piece of redwood driftwood. it sat perched like noah’s ark on mount ararat, and the water ran under it. but at the same time i realized it was the ark of a covenant, a new covenant which i was about to make with God. i had been trying to get off psychedelic drugs for years. i had continued taking them periodically with increasingly less rewarding results. once a few years before i had made a vow in the mountains before a shadowy vision of the sacred heart of jesus that i would quit for good,. but i had failed. it was too difficult in the environment in which i was immersed at the time, a group of traveling seekers looking for enlightenment. but this time i framed the vow differently. it would be for three years only. three years to see if it would make a difference in my life. this ark, this combined symbol of noah and moses, would be the seal of my bargain with God. i took the ark and returned to my apartment in san francisco. i don’t remember seeing my hare krishna sidekick again after that.

there was a small room in the apartment where an artist named david had lived. i had recently tripped in that room on some very strong acid my friend kim had given me just before i put him on an airplane to florida at the oakland airport. the acid came on so strong i began to hallucinate on the tile floor of the terminal...mosaics like roman art from pompei. the car was breaking down on the way home, and i was able to pull it into a garage in berkeley where another friend of mine worked on cars. then i hitchhiked home to san francisco and walked out haight street tripping my eyeballs out. when i got home i had the strangest sense that God was in that room. i could feel His palpable presence in a way that seemed extremely real. that was the room into which i introduced the devil’s fingerbone and the ark of my covenant. i also had a pine thyrsis which i kept on a pedestal. that room became my temple.

that night i went out looking for milk and oreos. i ran into a character named pan at the store and invited him home. i was still tripping, and we decided to load the car with everything holy and take off for berkeley in the morning to try and raise some gas money for a cross-country odyssey to buffalo, new york, where i wanted to look up my old girlfriend p. j. when we got to berkeley the next day, i began giving old testament readings from the little bible and collecting money in a bowl. i didn’t get much. i had the devil’s fingerbone with me. the car was parked in a metered spot, and i sent pan to move the car. that was a serious mistake. he never came back. the ark was in the back seat of the car.

after i registered the shock of losing my car and most of my belongings, i went back to the apartment in san franscisco and found a note from pan. he said he needed the car and i needed to be free from it. he gave me an address in portland, oregon, where i could look for him. fine. i moved out of the apartment and back to nora’s in berkeley. about that time a friend of mine from an oregon commune was driving back that way, so i took a ride and discovered the address in portland to be an islamic ashram; and they said pan had stolen a car from them as well. i stopped by the oregon commune where my friend had been headed and left “the devil’s fingerbone” with him and returned to berkeley.

shortly thereafter i received a notice from the california highway department that my car had been found in mendocino county. i hitchhiked to ukiah, the county seat, and found that the car was in fact in a junk yard in the town of mendocino itself. there i was able to redeem the car for a tape recorder i had stuck in the trunk. the car was badly damaged and had a sign on it that said “free car”. the windshield was busted, but it still ran and i could still see. most of my possessions were still in the trunk. i drove south on the coast as far as gualala where i stopped at a laundromat and had a breakdown. a young man helped me get the car started and invited me to stay at a house where he and some other workers for a real estate development called “the sea ranch” were living. i did and ended up storing my gear in a shed and giving the broken down car for which i had only paid $100 to the young man for holding my stuff. i couldn’t have afforded to get it fixed and it would have been illegal back in the city, so why not let him drive it around that little hippie town of gualala while i went back to berkeley where i eventually borrowed a car from jeanne l. and went back and got my belongings.

then kim came back from florida and we rented a car on one of the credit cards i had been given since i was registered as a graduate student again at berkeley in my hair-brained scheme to get an interdisciplinary phd. in rock and roll at the same time i was running for student body president and lost. i had used one of those cards to fly kim to florida in the first place. he claimed to have briefly cornered the cocaine market in key west, but came back broke. we drove to oregon and visited my ex-old lady laurie in cannon beach and visited that commune “ithilien”, where i had left “the devil’s fingerbone” which i recovered. we drove to seattle and caught a flight back east. we rented another car in buffalo where i was too late to see p.j., but saw my old freshman english professor from rice university, gerald o’grady, who was running the media center. that’s where i got stopped at a toll booth with no money (we were traveling on the cards) and had to sing a few bars of the grateful dead’s “uncle john’s band” to the highway officer before he would let us go.

we drove on to atlantic city where i left kim in the holiday inn and took the fingerbone and flew back to california. i had a long and difficult time after that. i became homeless and eventually returned to texas, but i didn’t take acid or any other psychedelic again for three years except a little taste of blue krishna just before i left berkeley. in texas i got psychiatric help and after three years went to new mexico where i took some acid at a hippie festival and maybe once a year for a few years after that and then quit altogether. the redwood ark was lost when jeanne l. moved from berkeley, and i threw “the devil’s fingerbone” away on the instructions of a roman catholic priest when i made my first confession in the late 70’s. nothing difficult lasts forever, at least that’s what i think, if you try hard enough, because the wonderful thing is that it does wear off after a while. later you can look back at it and see if you learned anything.

from the realm of no thingness


before i returned to texas in the summer of 1973, i flipped out on credit cards and rented cars and bought airplane tickets and took a kid named kim to buffalo as i pursued p.j. one more time and then on to atlantic city where i left kim and flew back to berkeley. i was rapidly getting seriously ill, at times almost catatonic, and slept under trees on campus and in an abandoned psych lab up in the hills until i got a temporary work study job at the university of california press, but was so depressed i had a traffic accident and accidentally cut off a vine that covered the whole side of a house where i was working in yard maintenance. it was about then nora and dad got to me and i came home, only temporarily i believed at the time, but i ended up staying for most of the rest of my life.

also, about that time, just before i returned to texas i met kay johnson, or kayjay, who was an old beat poet, and as i later learned was prominent at the beat hotel in paris in the late 50’s. she had published a book at city lights, and we palled around for several weeks. i would meet kayjay again in 1984, and she was the last person i saw before leaving on that occasion, as she practically was at this time in 1973. there’s a website devoted to kaja and i have an article about her on it.


chapter seven

when i got back to texas in late july of 1973, i was in pretty bad shape. dad encouraged me just to rest and relax and let mother feed me. i agreed to see a psychiatrist and did see one, one my brother pat had previously seen, but it did not evolve into an actual therapeutic relationship. i wrote letters to several local colleges looking for a teaching engagement for the fall. i got a call from a man named neil duncan at texas wesleyan college here in fort worth and was given one section of freshman composition to teach. this was a great break. the next semester they gave me three sections, two of which were introduction to literature. had i been in a condition to pursue my phd. at a local university, i might have found a more or less permanent home at texas wesleyan. unfortunately, i was a little too sick for that.

i had run up some debts in my last months in berkeley that year. as a result of being re-enrolled as a graduate student at the university, i had received a number of credit cards including some gasoline and airline cards. in desperation i had used these for travel expenses; and while i paid off some of them adequately, there was at least one, an exxon, i think, that i never did completely pay. i did, however, eventually pay off my student loans from that last year; and i repaid my personal loan from peter st. with an advance my grandfather had offered to make to me.

i rented a small garage apartment and focused on my duties at texas wesleyan. i had almost no relationships outside my family except for my students. i did spend some time with a slightly older woman who was a friend of my aunt’s and with whom i had been involved previously, she was a schoolteacher and an artist, and something of a mentor, but terribly alcoholic and not approving of smoking grass which i continued to do. later we would twice become engaged. nonetheless, i was firm in my determination not to take any further psychedelics for at least three years, and that is in fact what i did.
in the spring i moved into a larger apartment and tried to concentrate on my writing. about that time i received a letter from doug p. who had relocated to santa fe, new mexico. our correspondence at that time was very interesting and encouraging. i considered going to join him again, but as the academic year began to wind down i found myself seriously adrift and uncomfortable. there were no real prospects for the coming year, and i did not know what i was going to do for employment. mother arranged for me to see a psychiatrist who worked part-time at the episcopal counseling center, dr. robert glen, whom i actually saw in dallas. bob was a great hulk of a man, with snowy hair and beard and a jovial face like santa claus, who lived in a large home on white rock lake. we met in a long room that had a fireplace and chairs at one end and a waterfall and garden at the other. often bob’s great saint bernard avalanche sat in on our sessions. there was an ocelot in a long cage out by the pool.

bob immediately diagnosed me as schizophrenic and put me on stellazine and artane. we agreed to meet twice a week for the time being. stellazine was an anti-psychotic, fairly recently invented at the time, spring, 1974, that was derived from thorazine which was used to bring people down off bad acid trips. years later in houston i would meet the doctor who had largely created stellazine and found out that he had been the doctor at stanford who actually initially gave lsd to ken kesey. leo h. was his name. he had
a schyzophrenic son, almost as a co-incidence, who was a friend of mine at a psychiatric social club i belonged to in houston in the late 80’s . doc h. and his associate had come out from palo alto to run a psychiatric hospital in houston and lived in a very large high-rise that was reportedly once owned by sonny bono, in the penthouse apartment where they collected great art; and i was a frequent visitor in that home.

to get back to dr. glen. soon after our sessions began, bob went on vacation and recommended that i attend timberlawn day hospital in dallas while he was gone. timberlawn was a very fashionable psychiatric hospital in east dallas. by then mother and dad and i were living in an apartment in grand prairie between fort worth and dallas because dad was working as president of a large insurance company in dallas at the time.

the day hospital was interesting if somewhat difficult. what was most difficult was getting a favorable discharge. you more or less had to work your way out...find a job, get an apartment, become stable, etc. i was having no luck at finding a job at all. eventually dad rescued me by arranging for me to be employed by an insurance agent acquaintance of his who had a contract with the company dad was president of. i worked for about nine months as an administrative assistant to pat h., a former marine aggie lawyer turned insurance agent whose wife carol was more or less their office manager. life with pat and carol was fun and interesting for the most part. i managed the agents’ accounts and worked on possible contact leads and did typing and filing and had lunch with carol almost every day. they were wonderful people.

i got an apartment in dallas and began attending holy cross episcopal church in oaklawn where pat and carol were friends with father b., the rector, who was very kind to me at the time. devotional life at holy cross was good, and that was where i signed up to go to cursillo, an intense long weekend short course in christianity which i attended at the episocpal retreat center at lake grapevine. i had acquired a car by this time and had no trouble negotiating a commuting life style. when i first started teaching at texas wesleyan, i shared a car with mother, an olds cutlass, i think, which after a trip to new york at christmas time, was given to me permanently. i was still driving that car when i worked for pat and carol.

the trip to new york i mentioned was in late december 73 and early january 74. i went to visit my friends debbie and al from berkeley who were then living back in new york. debbie was working for the sergeant shriver law firm in the world trade center, and al was a probation officer in brooklyn. they lived at 2 grace court in brooklyn heights. it was a good visit. lots of snow. i went into the village some and i think visited the metropolitan museum. it wasn’t my best trip to new york, but we got stoned a lot and went to max’s kansas city; and i remember meeting a woman fabric designer who looked a lot like elizabeth taylor that night, and i wrote a lot while i was in brooklyn.

while i worked with pat and carol i went to see peter s. in detroit that thanksgiving. that was also a good trip. peter and his mate caroline were living together in a nice large home. peter was teaching in detroit. and they had their older son. i don’t think their younger son was born at that time. there were some other people from berkeley present, a young blakean and his wife and kids, somebody else and a woman who seemed sort of interesting. we drank a lot of whiskey and smoked a little weed and ate and had a good time. i think that was when we visited peter’s brother in a large mansion in an old detroit neighborhood. i had met him on the west coast. he was a surgeon and had a young family, and it seemed like we would all see each other often again; but in fact i have pretty much just seen peter and that only a few times in all these years.

at the end of my period of working with pat and carol i decided to go to new mexico and visit doug p. and his companion kelsey h. i left in late may or early june and drove straight through. it was magical seeing doug and kelsey again. they weren’t actually married yet at that time. doug was working as the janitor at a fashionable restaurant, the pink adobe, and had begun painting in oil again. his new work was very exciting. the santa fe lifestyle appealed to me a lot. i might have stayed, but we got very stoned one dusky evening, and doug began reading some of his macabre poetry, and i got spooked and split suddenty, so suddenly they had to mail my clothes back to me. it was a very unstable time for me. i thought kelsey had followed me out of town in their van, and i drove to a remote motel somewhere east of albuquerque and hid out for a couple of days. it’s hard to explain. i thought what doug had said was that he had worked all his former disciples into a collage in the basement and saved me for last. i must have hallucinated all of that.

when i got back to texas i rented an apartment in dallas and hooked up with a young man i had met at timberlawn. we rented an apartment across the street from holy cross episcopal church where we smoked a lot of dope and i began painting again. i was seeing dr. glen all this time as well and attending holy cross. jeanne l. came to visit from california, and we went to oklahoma together where we camped out in the ouchita mountains game preserve. it was after that that she announced her intention to marry peter h., a british roommate of hers in berkeley, who eventually became a psychiatrist and later they divorced before she married her current husband, a successful california artist.

rob a. was the young man i had met at timberlawn. we got along for a while, and i worked as a bus boy at the torch restaurant and was also seeing a good bit of my grandmother who still lived in dallas at the time. i was pretty depressed and eventually moved back home with mother and dad. dad at that time was still working in dallas, but had an interest in a data processing company in fort worth. his partner in that enterprise was pat biediger, and i went to work with pat as a computer operator which was a gig that started in the spring of 76 and lasted until 83 or 84. it involved a lot of physical labor, was fairly pleasant and kept me out of serious trouble all those years. the work was mostly at night and on weekends.

i rented an apartment in fort worth with guy s., a dallas man i had met at the bayou landing, who had a degree in english from texas tech and had published an essay on hemingway. i brought guy to fort worth first to live at the ymca and help me with some literary research, and then we rented an old apartment where he did not stay very long. by then i was going to a gay bar in fort worth, the other place, on west seventh and beginning to have quite a few brief affairs. in addition to my computer job, which at first was only part time, i took a job as cook at a fast food cafe, sort of a hamburger stand, called rockyfeller’s. i worked there for several months until the father of a high school friend offered me a job in his insurance agency which i took, but it only lasted a few months. by then i was more or less full time into my computer job. it was 1976 and my three years period without any psychedelics was over.

i went to santa fe again in late spring and attended a hippie festival in the mountains above santa fe and found some acid and took it once again. that experience was more or less commemorated in a poem i will append later. i bought my first oil painting by doug on that trip for $100, a beautiful little parrot-like thing with a large purple and yellow eye. on a deep brick red background. that was also when i first met doug’s friends esther and bob, and a young woman who taught me a little about playing a violin. it was a good trip i took the bus out and flew back home.

the concluding section of the poem below tells something about this particular acid trip.
i am aware that all of this section seems pretty sketchy. there are a lot of years to cover and a lot of situations and people. this just gives a rough skeleton framework of 73-76. i should have more to say about a lot of it later.

i came down out of the hills
near market street and castro.
this was before the castro went gay.
the union 76 globe shone like a harvest moon.
the mobile sign was jumbled and seemed to read “limbo”.
the shell sign was truncated to “hell”.
i made my way to north beach and went
into an old bar where beat poets used to read to jazz.
there was an early version of “styx” on stage
and a banner on the wall which read
“styx river ferry gets you across”.
it made me think of the great maha prajna paramita hridaya mantra
gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, svaha.
gone, gone, gone to that other shore, long gone, safely gone, so be it;
and then i think of that other banner i read on acid in 1968
when i first met the honky tonk angel review
columbia records welcomes you
the quick and the dead
the afterlife
rock and roll hell
you get used to it
after a while.

i think of coming down out of the hills
(i seem somehow to always be coming out of the hills.)
outside santa fe at a hippie festival in 1976,
my first real trip in three years.
i emerged from the woods beside a great effigy of a sun god.
the hippies were dancing in the rain, a strange tibetan dance.
i wandered down by a brook and knelt, and esther lowe came up to me and said i should come and sit with her and bob.
then i saw something lavender stir on the ground and went closer and it was a baby wrapped in a blanket or afghan alone in the gentle rain.
bob was reading trungpa’s “mudra”, the copy esther would later give to me.
late that night i met a large dog and we walked all night
until he disappeared in the morning.
i thought he might have been chenrazee,
the tibetan version of avalokatesvara,
the buddha of all compassionate hearing.
i went into the sheraton hotel
and shaved in the public bathroom.
as the razor passed over my chin,
i repeated the name,
chenrazee, yeah, chenrazee


chapter eight

the late 70’s are something of a blur. in late winter or early spring of 76, before i went to santa fe and took that hit of acid at a hippie festival, i worked for a short period at pier one import company in their computer department. i was in training as an operator, but the work was too demanding, and i was ultimately turned loose. this was at the same time that i was getting started with george and biediger as a computer operator also. in the very early days, all i did was transmit data back and forth between our office in fort worth and an office outside chicago of the life insurance company whose accounting records we were for all my years as an operator generating. mother and dad and i still lived in grand prairie, dad still worked in dallas primarily, and mother drove back into fort worth almost every day.

dad offered to send me to t.c.u. in computer programming studies, and i enrolled in a night class, but i did not follow through with it. it was about that time that i discovered the bayou landing, a large gay nightclub in dallas where i began going at night. the landing was an extension of a club in houston that i had visited some years earlier and which might have been a hippie club before it went gay. the dallas bayou landing was in an old warehouse and definitely had been a hippie club earlier, the pearl street warehouse. it was rather like a seedy country club in that it had a large dining room with fake plastic tiffany light fixtures, or maybe that was actually a ceiling light bar, i’m not sure, a large main bar and dance hall, a small but well-stocked shop with jewelry and wearing apparel, and a small back bar with a smaller dance floor. i often hung out in the back bar, and sometimes bought things in the shop. i also often ate in the dining room, usually a burger and fries.

the bartender in the backbar was memorable because later he was the main bartender at the eighth day in the early eighties where i met gerald t. with whom i still correspond. that bartender had a young friend from north carolina who took me to a party at the bar-tender’s house while the bartender was in the hospital, having been shot in the stomach when he stopped to assist some people in trouble on the highway. later that bartender committed suicide in the bathroom at the eighth day. that night at the bartender’s house i took a preludin, which was a speedy diet pill, and did quite a bit of cocaine. i finally went home at four in the morning and substantially repainted every canvas in my room, which was quite a few. the next day i discovered that i had lost my american express card at that party, but i recovered it successfully with no ill consequences. that next morning i also went in for an impromptu visit with dr. glen who cautioned me to be more careful in the future about taking strange drugs.

also, about that time, i met guy s., as i think i have already mentioned. guy and i were friends for many years. i spent a lot of time with him at his mother’s house in university park in dallas, and we lived together several times...first at the apartment i rented in late summer 1976 while i was working for rockyfeller’s hamburger stand and just before i went to work for my friend’s father’s insurance agency. it was a rickety third floor broke down furnished sort of place. guy didn’t live there that long, but i remember a lot of people from there. i think either the ymca or the salvation army actually owned the building which has long since been torn down.

i met a man named mike harris there whom i continued to see for a while even after i moved to the blackstone hotel in downtown fort worth. mike was a mixed up kid on drugs who caused me a fair amount of grief, but we had some good times. once i came home and found him passed out in my bed with a young woman, and a loaded pistol in his hand. another time i caught him dressed up in one of my best suits out in the parking lot talking to a man named harmony, and when i told him to come upstairs and take the suit off, he pulled a pistol on me. another time he took me hostage with a sawed off shotgun and we drove around u. t. arlington for a while looking at students. when i finally quit seeing him, after he was kicked out of the blackstone permanently, i gave him my most expensive suit which i had bought at washer brothers department store that year for $175 in 1976. i think i saw him one last time at the westchester house, a high rise apartment building on the south side, now turned into assisted living housing, and after that don’t know what happened to him.

by early 1977 i was pretty much just working for george and biediger. it was getting to be full time. i lived at the ymca a couple of times...once was while i was taking a painting course along with my aunt dodo or dorothea; and that was when i painted my still life with apples and sherry bottle. i painted it in my room at the y. rooms at the y were cheap and clean enough, but not air conditioned. you had to leave your windows open, and the noisy street sounds were almost omnipresent. later i rented a room there after i moved out of the coronado apartments, which were the ones where i lived with guy s., at the corner of west seventh and summit, and where i met mike harris. this might have been after the blackstone hotel. i remember it was snowing and i let a young man i knew from the coronado sleep on the floor and ended up loaning him my stereo and records, and got ripped off. i found the stereo in a pawn shop and redeemed it, but never recovered the records.

it was while i was at the coronado that i got to hanging out at the other place. that was the name of the first gay bar i frequented in fort worth. i had visited it once at a previous location while i still lived in california. it was a lively place back then and still was when i started going there in the mid 70’s. i met a lot of interesting people there, cookie, walter e., cowboy james and a great-great grandson of thomas nast, the famous cartoonist from new york. cookie was a great character, a chronic alcoholic, who later sobered up before he died with an aneurism some years later. cowboy james is still around as far as i know, and i was crazy about him for years, but never could get close. one night at the bailey street wherehouse, not far from where i live now, i got to buying cowboy drinks and asked him to come back to the blackstone with me, but he said he couldn’t. he said, “it might mean something to you, but it wouldn’t mean anything to me”. i got so drunk that night, i wrecked my car a little bit in the downtown parking garage. by then i had a 73 chevy malibu painted gold.

mother and dad moved back to fort worth about that time and lived at indian creek apartments until they rented the little house on lafayette street where they lived until grandmother died in 81 and they were able to buy the house on hillcrest that mother remodelled so extensively, but which daddy eventually lost through no really terrible fault of his own. i only lived at indian creek a short time while i was working at pier one, but eventually i lived in the lafayette house for a few years. it had a little bedroom and bath in the back where i was fairly comfortable. that was where our brittany spaniel ginger died in my room late one night.

there were other gay bars. there was the in-between on carrol street across from the old montgomery wards and there was always the 651, the oldest operating gay bar in fort worth on jennings avenue on the south side. i hung out there sometimes as well. that’s where i first encountered roy a. it was about the time i joined the catholic church which must have been in 77 or 78. i had hooked up with an old friend about that time in dallas, strictly as friends, and had been to a few charismatic prayer meetings. one of my friends from high school had recently converted to roman catholicism, as had my older brother pat. i was working at another night club, called patches, just up the street from the 651. it was owned by three men, one of whom was tim bailey who also owned the in-between on carrol street and later was a partner in the bailey street wherehouse. i was very fond of tim and one time he and his lover georgia bailey took me home to their converted duplex down in the area behind montgomery wards. georgia ran the drag shows at the in-between. that was where i met the man who became tika marie, and april love and that wonderful man who impersonated carol burnett so well.

at any rate, i was working as a dishwasher at patches and getting off at four or five in the morning on sundays and getting stoned and feeling pretty desolate; and i started going to 6am mass at saint patrick’s downtown. i felt a wonderful comfort there, as i often have, and my friend alex arranged for me to meet a priest at ut arlington, father jerry s., who eventually gave me instruction, and i came into the church around that time. i was also attending mass at holy family and going to rosary group. it was a good time and temporarily at least seemed to lift me out of my difficult and strange circumstances.

if it seems somewhat odd that i should mention such a momentous occasion as joining the roman catholic church almost as a casual happening, perhaps it should be understood in the context of my extreme suffering and discouragement at the time. and the hope that i saw reflected in my friends and family member who seemed to have found such a permanent home. actually, neither my brother nor my friend from high school are now active communicants in the church. as you know by now i am a communicant once again in the episcopal church. to some extent my initial experience of the roman church was colored by my involvement in dignity, which was a ministry specifically to gay catholics that has since been all but completely suppressed by the increasingly conservative direction of the church since the late 1970’s in my first year as a roman catholic i had three different popes. i was well aware of the strict discipline that seemed to be required by the church at that time, but i was influenced by a liberal interpretation that has now almost disappeared. i was probably wrong to take the step i did at the time i did, but i still acknowledge the ultimate validity of that discipline and desire to be more in conformity with it, as in fact i now am. i have come back to the episcopal tradition because this is where i found the strength and encouragement to deal not only with my drug problem but my personal instability as well. i am about three and a half years drug free and maybe just as far away from my last sexual relationhip from which i am very grateful to be freed without further consequences. i should also mention that i was deeply touched at the time by the charismatic movement within the church. i was briefly engaged to a catholic woman; but, as usual, we never made it down the aisle.

there were others. there was don or dusty, a little cowboy from granbury, whom i liked very much, but who did not see me as quite what he was looking for. there was an episcopal clergyman i used to see from time to time who was very good to me, (that was in the mid-70’s) and who is now deceased. i have mentioned roy a. roy was an alcoholic i befriended about the time i joined the roman church and continued to see intermittently for a while and last ran into downtown in the late 80’s. i haven’t heard from him in 15 years.

in 1979 i met a man at the corral named ed g. from monroe, louisiana. i became friends with ed and his circle of alcoholic friends that fall and began a relationship with a young man named erv. it wasn’t very satisfactory, but i rented a rather large house on the south side of town for the two of us and ended up renting out rooms in one of those strange scenes that ended in disaster. i haven’t seen erv in many years either. i last ran into him on a bus, and he was married again with two small children. ed and his brother henry are both now deceased, and through them i met people i am not even comfortable mentioning, so dangerous was their behavior. i lived for a time in a rooming house on the south side of fort worth, but that was not really until the end of the 80’s.


interlude

the bus from santa fe to denver came to a stop at the lonely station on a hill overlooking raton, new mexico. had they passed through las vegas, new mexico, during the night? he wasn’t sure. but he had to change buses in raton. there would be an almost ten hour layover. there was a cheap motel next to the bus station. he didn’t even go into town. he checked into the motel and slept and watched television. on two different channels he ran into movies about trappist monks. merton had been a trappist. he and merton had appeared in the same issue of the sewanee review. merton was also “part buddhist”. he was on a pilgrimage, or more of a quest. he was going to boulder in search of trungpa. he had first heard of trungpa from doug p’s friends, bob and esther. he had corresponded with the college, naropa, a little bit in the mid-seventies. he was interested in their writing program. actually, he had heard of trungpa before bob and esther, when that young woman named “melody” from berkeley went there to study. she had been steve goodman’s girlfriend. steve would become a buddhist teacher later. i recently found him on the internet. melody had died at naropa or its immediate predecessor, trungpa’s meditation establishment. she had caught hepatitis. bob and esther would tell him that she was buried on the grounds of the college. she had given him his first copy of ... what was that wonderful book? trungpa’s first big success? confused with the four mindfulnesses by an early dalai lama, he thought. meditation in action, that was it. built around the six paramitas. o prana paramita, bodhi svaha.


i came out of the santuario
in santa fe in early spring.
the sky was full of dark storm clouds.
i listened to the rumble of thunder
and witnessed the flash of lightning
before the sudden downpour and i
sought shelter once again in the church.
when i came back outside again,
the clouds had cleared and the sky was radiant
and on the mountains was
fresh fallen snow.
it was as if the virgin herself
had touched down out of the sky
and struck the peaks with a magic wand,
so mysterious was the shroud
which draped the mountains white with snow.
i felt a kind of reverence
was hard to share and
hard to know.


i was working for this designer’s showcase in dallas.
everyone there was long on attitude.
this danish silk flower arranger was coming to give a demonstration.
i was asked to unpack the flowers and put similar ones together,
but then the boss came by and complained,
“you’re arranging. i didn’t tell you to arrange the flowers.”
next thing that happened...
the danish flower gun had a manager who arrived before him
and wanted some kind of a sign for the demonstration.
i offered to do one and she
took me downstairs to art supply where
i bought some colored markers and board.
i was working on this really cool design when
the danish flower arranger arrived.
he took one look at what i was doing and said,
“whatever are you doing?”
“making a sign for your demonstration,” i replied.
“oh, no, you’re not,” he went on.
“you’re using color and nobody uses color around me
except me”.
he stopped me dead in my tracks and then
he took me out for a guacamole burger.


chapter nine

after the doug p. experience i was used to smoking marijuana and i smoked it for close to thirty-five years until i almost by accident became addicted to crack cocaine and had to stop everything, including alcohol. after many failed attempts, i returned to the church of my youth, the episcopal church, and have been fairly stable and secure there with better than three years of good time to my credit now, and glad to get this story off my chest. it was a very interesting set of situations. it took me to some strange places and introduced me to some strange people. i’m not sorry to have had it, but i wouldn’t want to do it over again for anything. it cost too much. i give special thanks and praise to my creator and Lord for having kept me safe through so many dangerous circumstances and letting me live long enough to become safe within His love and the hope that I have for a future life. i’m sixty-three years old. my psychiatric disability has carried me through the past twenty years and the retirement i earned teaching and working as a computer operator may well keep me going another twenty. i have good medical care, a stable lifestyle and a vocation as a writer and poet i will continue to pursue as long as i live.

from 86 to 89 i lived in houston. i had been to california. well, let’s go back to 1980 briefly. i was living with ed and erv and others on cannon street at the time. i moved out of that house when the terrible summer weather arrived. after that i think i lived with my parents again on lafayette. at the end of 79 i had been living in some nice apartments on the west side, but my involvement with ed g. and his group ended up getting me evicted, and that was when i rented the house on cannon at lipscomb. in 81, my grandmother died and mother and dad bought the house on hillcrest. i lived there for quite a while. in 82 i taught junior college for a semester and became involved with frank g., a wino former hell’s angel vietnam purple heart with whom i eventually went to california in 84. so that teaching gig must have been 83. also that year i went to new mexico for several months and lived with doug and kelsey and worked in an art gallery with them. before that i met the st. brothers (not peter from detroit) and their family and lived and partied with them for a long time. i met them primarily because of ron drury, a poet friend who also hung out at the corral. ron eventually gave in to drug addiction and alcoholism and became homeless. he was staying at the mission the last time i saw him, but i think it very unlikely he is still alive. i took up with one of the st. brothers again in the early 90’s and lived with him and his girl friend and her two children for a time, dealing pot for a lady friend who has since died. then i moved into whisperwind apartments where i lived for seven years from 93 to 2001 after dad died in 92. i had made one last effort to move to new mexico or california, but after dad got sick i stayed home and close to mother after that. while at whisperwind i met ron h. with whom i am still friends, and to some extent through ron i met bruce, my last real attachment of that sort, who introduced me to crack cocaine which brought the whole framework of my unfortunate career all but crashing down on top of my head, and i quit more or less everything altogether. this is where i am now. trying to sort it all out, trying to make sense of it, trying to reform. it is very difficult. i continue to receive psychiatric treatment and medication. i am fairly stable, and i live pretty much in isolation now, trying to concentrate on prayer, my poetry and this ongoing exploration which may provide some opportunity to tell an instructive story somewhere along the way.

my last acid, which always makes me think of browning’s poem, “my last duchess”, was in houston in 1989. it was with a young man from michigan. it was not very satisfying and i haven’t wanted to do any more since.

i took acid maybe a couple of times with erv in the house on cannon street, just off lipscomb, in 1980. we had a good time, but i don’t remember a lot about it. that relationship turned violent later on, and was one of the reasons i moved out of that house, leaving it with ed g. and his brother.

i took acid with the st. brothers in the spring of 83 on easter even. it was a strange trip. the drug came from a man named tramp. soon after i took it i realized how strong it was as the carpet began to roll like the ocean. i had surrendered my room for the night to one of the brothers and his girl friend, so i really had no where safe to trip. i got in my car, by then a 1980 ford mustang, and drove to my parents’ house on hillcrest. no one was home except the great dane. there were waxen gladiolas in the sink, looking funereal. i couldn’t figure out where mother and dad could be until i realized it was easter even and they were in church. i felt like matthew arnold’s “forsaken merman” looking in the window of the church from which he was excluded because of the strange race to which he belonged. my rooms were in the back of the house. i had been painting in a studio i set up in the garage, one of the best i ever had, and my paintings were all over my rooms. they seemed to come alive, almost to start talking to me. i thought at first perhaps the rapture had taken place and taken my parents away, and i was left behind. but i wondered why the dog was still there. i felt wasted. and then i heard a roar in the driveway and it was mother and dad come home. mother went into the bedroom, and i told dad i needed to tell him something, and he said what, and i told him i was on acid again. he said he thought i didn’t do that anymore, but i said i did maybe once a year. he said something to the effect that sometimes he tried to be a friend to me, but he wasn’t sure i wanted him in that role anymore. then he told me to go call dr. glen which i did. dr. glen said he was very sorry i had taken the acid, told me not to go to the emergency room, asked me if i had taken any stellazine. told me to take two more and call him in the morning. i did and tried to go to bed. i was tripping my eyeballs off. a whole rodeo took place inside my head, but finally the crisis passed; and i got back in the car and drove back to the st. brothers where one of their cousins was with a girl named pepper in the living room and asked me if i wanted to participate. i didn’t. eventually i fell asleep. it wasn’t all that terrible, but it wasn’t anything i wanted to repeat.

then there was the night in 1984 when i tripped on what were supposed to be psylocibin mushrooms in san francisco but felt just like strong acid. i bought the mushrooms from a poet named byron p. who was a friend of jeanne l’s. it was in the mission district. i had bought him some speed so he could write an article for poetry flash, the bay area poetry newspaper. the mushrooms came on so strong i had to ask him to let me stay the night. he and his roommate anita v., now a transsexual named max, went out to see a group called “dead kennedys”. obviously i did not want to go. anita took care of me a good bit that evening. it was for her i wrote:

lord of the fly agarics

i, too, am anita’s
even the giant berserkers of norway
ingested to warriors become

it was probably a good drug, but the circumstances were unfortunate. i could hear arguing in spanish in an adjacent apartment and hallucinated bloody daggers. brian has since passed away. he died of an aneurism in new orleans. i had asked to get some more mushrooms and given him the money, but he never delivered. .

after that there was just that last trip in houston in 1989 before i returned to fort worth. and that was the end of my psychedelic history. it wasn’t quite the end of my drug experiences. i still had crack cocaine to look forward to. and that was such another universe, i couldn’t even consider a toke of grass anymore. i follow a strict n.a. program without the meetings. my church, and my poetry, are my meetings; but i feel fairly certain i’ll never do another experimental drug again. i’m on excellent medication, got good medical care, there’s no reason to think there is anything left for me in drugs anymore. God undoubtedly has something else in store for me, like life in heaven with my loved ones and Him; and in the meantime i find christianity, orthodox christianity, the best way of belief i could possibly hope to find. i just wish there was some way i could share it with more people. it’s been such a miracle to me, such a deliverance, and so very rewarding, however difficult at times. i’ll never embrace anything else.

in late spring of 1983 i moved to new mexico to be with doug and kelsey again. at that time his two grown children were living with him as well. we lived in a comfortable apartment near the center of taos and operated a gallery which was co-owned by a prominent financier who had recently left santa barbara, california, and was investing heavily in taos enterprises. the gallery was in an old adobe building adjacent to an espresso bar where on at least one occasion i read some of my poetry.

the gallery did not appear to be doing well financially, and tensions began to rise among us; and i began looking for an independent place to rent where i could pursue my writing and some art. at the time i was still receiving maybe $125 a week from my father who was doing rather well with his insurance companies in fort worth. i did not, however, find the alternative housing i was looking for, and the situation developed that i would have to move out of doug’s apartment on fairly short notice.

about that time i met a couple of relatively homeless alcoholics, one an iroquois sculptor from buffalo, new york, and the other an anglo drug dealer who had recently been selling acid in berkeley. the three of us began looking for a place to rent where we could conceivably spend the winter. we looked at a derelict cabin in the mountains but decided it was unfeasible. the iroquois sculptor, moon by name, told us of a hot springs where we could camp out for a while. it was in the wilderness behind los alamos north of santa fe. we were able to park at a public camping ground and hike in to the hot springs. there was a small cave above the hot springs where we camped for maybe a week before the young drug dealer and i went into the town of jemez springs which lay below our campsite. there we spent a night and were both surprised to find a loaded pistol under my bed the next morning. we smuggled it out of town and headed back to camp.

moon was becoming increasingly hostile, and i had been eating some of the polka-dotted tomato-colored amanitas mushrooms that blossomed after a warm rain along the path into our camp. the mushrooms were making me somewhat paranoid, and i decided to head back up to the car for one reason or another, and by the time i was halfway there had decided it was time to split the scene which i did immediately.

i drove back to taos where i got some more of my things from doug and kelsey’s and after an evening at the abominable snowman, a youth hostel in the outlying town of arroyo seco, i drove straight back to texas.

in texas i moved in with one of the st. brothers and his girl friend who was pregnant at the time. we occupied a fairly large house on fort worth’s southside where i continued to live for a while after the couple had separated and moved out. i had met a young latino woman with whom i was having an affair and who thought she might be pregnant until she left to join her lesbian lover and reportedly had a miscarriage.

about that time i met bob m., a young man from oregon, who was staying at raina lea’s, the famous drag empress. bob moved into the rented house with me and eventually we rented a garage apartment more or less in the center of west fort worth. we lived there through a terribly difficult winter during which my grandmother george who had suffered a stroke the previous year passed away.

bob and i did take a certain amount of acid and smoked a lot of weed. we eventually broke up under the strain of our relationship, and bob moved out into a nearby duplex. i took in five-dollar billy for a while, but that didn’t work out for long; and then wino frank from the previous year was involved in a bad accident that left him in a wheel chair with two broken legs, and i let him come to stay with me.

one night frank and i got loaded and decided to go to california. i had a 1980 blue ford granada at the time. it had been a damaged company car, and dad had given it to me. my mustang was still not completely paid for and was sitting in the garage at mother and dad’s. it was early spring of 84.

frank and i drove more or less straight through to northern california in a couple of days. we had a breakdown the first night outside midland, texas, with a flat tire; but i got that fixed, and we rode fairly smoothly to the other side of l.a. where we had a minor breakdown which frank was able to fix, propped up on his two bad legs. i left frank in a motel in his home town of palo alto and drove on to berkeley, where i found my old landlady, nora kornell; and nora let me move into one of her rooming houses as an assistant to her in moving things around and various odd jobs, as she had back in early 1972. nora was 73 by then.

i didn’t stay with nora that long. i re-established with an old girl friend, lenore mc., whom i had dated in the spring of 67 and was serious about before p. j. showed up that summer, but who had already essentially rejected me by that time. lenore had a two bedroom house she was renting in berkeley and needed a roommate and made me a very generous offer. i lived platonicaly with lenore for some time. she was dating another man at the time.

while i was at lenore’s, after a few months, i took a bus back to texas where i picked up the mustang as well and drove it to california. there i sold the granada to bob m. who by then had moved back to california from texas to be with his old associate, frank f.. they lived in sacramento and i saw them from time to time.

lenore and i had a falling out, and i moved back in with nora until frank g. came to stay with me again and the situation with nora degenerated. frank, who had been back in treatment for alcoholism, returned to palo alto. i moved into the carleton hotel where i had a room on the fifth floor overlooking sproul plaza and the university.

i lived there for a few months until i took in a street character named larry l. who turned out to be a lot of trouble, and i had to move out from under him. by then it was november and my father was pressing me to come home; so i did. i consulted with my old friend, kay johnson, an old beat poet who went by either guru-ji or swami-ji, and then i drove the long trip back to texas, stopping briefly in the california desert. that trip was the occasion for my short piece entitled “baby faye”.


baby faye

earlier in the day i had read on a newspaper headline that baby fay had died, baby fay, the little girl that received a baboon’s heart in transplant. i told myself i will probably cry before the day is out. that evening as i walked out of the hotel in berkeley onto telegraph avenue a car went by with the radio blaring. bette midler was singing the theme song from the movie “the rose”, something like “when the dream becomes the rose”; and i thought of all the infants, born and unborn, that died prematurely and thought of them as little angels at the feet of mary, and i started to cry.

soon after that i packed my things and drove back to texas. my first stop was in barstow, california, where baby fay’s mother had recently been interviewed sitting on a bar stool. a day and a half later i was in west texas, early in the morning, and decided to leave the interstate to look for a place to get breakfast. as i drove along the deserted highway, i came to a little town called barstow, texas. driving into the town i noticed a little shop on the left called fay’s dress shop, and then on the right i saw a little burger stand that said dairy mart, but for just a second in my bleary-eyed condition, i thought it read “hairy heart”.


a conclusion

back in texas 1985 was one of the most chaotic of my life. i moved maybe twelve times in about as many months. i lived in rooming houses and motels. i had an apartment with a speed freak named charlie. i lived at lake worth with an old retired british actor. i camped out. i lived in dallas with guy s. which was where i met gerald t. who was 23 at the time and just recently out of prison.

little jerry and i had some wild adventures working for a cocaine dealer. in the end we ripped off $700 worth of cocaine and had to disappear fast. we melted back into the fort worth-grand prairie woodwork and separated. i ran into jerry on a number of occasions after that. once i accidentally picked him up hitchhiking out of dallas. i rented a duplex from another one of the st. brothers where i painted and worked painting rooms in a nursing home. finally little jerry and i ended up in a rooming house on the southside. we had lived briefly with a young gay couple on the north side, but jerry was unable to get along; and i rented him a room and eventually moved into a larger room with kitchen with him. that, of course, didn’t work out either, and i eventually had to separate from jerry which wasn’t easy.

my father gave jerry the down payment on a car to take his things out of my car, and we both agreed not to see each other any more. we had said goodbye at a motel near the eighth day bar in dallas. my family arranged for me to go to houston and stay with my older brother pat and his wife at the time annette. they met us halfway. i did not take my car initially.

while in houston i investigated homosexuals anonymous that had been recommended by the then episcopal bishop of fort worth, clarence pope. it didn’t work out. it was too fundamentalist for me at the time. but mother located a psychiatric social club, the gathering place, that did work out. i stayed in houston almost another two years. i eventually went home and got my mustang.

at the gathering place i met a lot of friends, some of whom i am still in contact with to this day. i dated jessica d. whose father owned a real estate franchise business. i attended both the episcopal and catholic churches. i became very active at the gathering place, and we took a number of interesting trips together as a group. i rented an apartment in a complex with other clients of the gathering place, one of whom had a father, dick c., a retired a&m professor, who took an interest in my poetry. i wrote a lot of poetry and published two xerox books at the time. i also published in some local periodicals. i became friends with my friend jack from rice again. i bought my first word processor and studied that subject briefly with the texas rehabilitation commission..

it was a good time. i did sometimes go to gay bars and had a few casual affairs but nothing serious, although i did take up with a young man from fort worth i met at the exile two. he was staying with me when i decided it was time to return to fort worth. he came back with me but moved on to colorado shortly after that. i haven’t heard from him in many years. i heard from jerry t’s mother that he was back in prison and ended up writing to him again which i still do to this day.

in fort worth i stayed with ed g. and some friends of his for a while, and then moved into a rooming house on the southside of fort worth. i smoked a good bit of weed and did a little speed. i ran into jerry t. about that time and his girl friend from mississippi, and he stayed with me for a while. jerry was out of prison from time to time but has been locked up now continuously since 1992. that situation developed into a fairly desolate scene in another bad winter. i was still seeing dr. glen in dallas at the time and had been seeing him all the time i was in houston, because he was at the time head psychiatrist for the department of corrections out of huntsville, where i drove to see him at the ellis II unit.

dr. glen has since died.


in 1987 i qualified for a social security disability which i continue to receive at this time.
(note: actually my disability was converted to social security retirement when i turned 66 in 2011.)

i had been in houston from 86 to 89. when i first came back to fort worth i worked for dad for several months. he was just out of treatment for alcoholism himself. in the winter of early 1990 i ended up living in an apartment with some people on cocaine. i was briefly hospitalized and was even somewhat violent on at least one occasion. i was rediagnosed as bi-polar and put on lithium. when i came out i stayed in a half-way house until i moved back into the rooming house until i qualified for housing and moved into hunter plaza, a high rise downtown apartment complex operated by the housing authority. i lived there for two years, saw a number of different psychiatrists, and struggled with my addictions. most of this time i was thinking of myself as a buddhist again.

in the spring of 1992 i went back to new mexico to live in a compound in espanola owned by mary connell, former u.s. house of representatives speaker jim wright’s poet sister, who was a friend of doug’s. there i shared a house with mary’s schyzophrenic son. that worked for a while but finally fell apart. i had several good visits with doug and kelsey while i stayed at mary’s. one time i went to taos and spent a night at sandra w.’s; we went two-stepping at the sagebrush inn. the next day i rendezvoused with doug and kelsey who took me to their studio-gallery in arroyo seco just outside of taos. we looked at art and smoked a little and ate a chemical free chicken. the next morning we went for a walk in the light snow and encountered the abbot of the local zen center. then doug took me back to the bus. that was the last time i saw doug and kelsey. they moved to colorado some fifteen years ago and i never got to visit them there. doug passed away a year ago last summer. soon after that i had to leave mary’s. then i went on to california where i visted bob m. and his friend frank before going to san francsico where i spent one night at the civic center hotel and got a return bus to texas. bob and frank have both since died with aids. it’s something of a miracle that i never developed aids. it must either have been God’s mercy or a series of strange coincidences.

back in texas my father became seriously ill. i moved out of hunter plaza where i still had an apartment and into a house with one of the st. brothers who was living with a new woman and her two young daughters. i sold marijuana for a mutual friend and eventually got a small efficiency apartment on the southside until i qualified for section eight housing assistance, which had been my plan ever since leaving hunter. it was necessary to move out of hunter to qualify for the section eight so i could live in an ordinary apartment complex. my father died about this time.

i moved into a temporary apartment on the west side until my assistance was finally approved and moved into whisperwind apartments on the west side of fort worth. i lived there seven years. they were good years... productive years artistically. i did smoke a little weed, but i did not do any more serious drugs to speak of. there were people around me who did some speed and at the end i met a young man who was on crack cocaine. i didn’t know much about it and i didn’t try it at that time.

i hung out in a neighborhood bar and dated a local artist lady among others. i made a lot of friends in the complex, and we had a lot of good times. but unfortunately i fell out with the new maintenance manager and so much trouble developed that i decided to leave.

i moved down here where i now live six and a half years ago. times have been good here too, but i hooked up with another young man on crack and this time it got to me. it was unlike any drug i had known before. it threatened to take everything in sight and destroy it. it was a nightmare. i began pulling off of it right away and went back to narcotics anonymous, but it was a long hard struggle. eventually i turned back to the episcopal church looking for help, also somewhat attracted to the struggle over issues related to homosexuality that was going on in the church at the time, and still is. i received direction to the parish i had attended as a teenager where the priest was very firm in advising me on the essential necessity of my not doing any more cocaine. i was still plagued by that last relationship who would not leave me alone. after another slip with cocaine i went back to narcotics anonymous over three and a half years ago and established my current program of no illegal drugs or alcohol. with good advice and an uncanny experience of the love of God, i have remained clean and sober all this time and am finally free of the effects of that last relationship which was in fact my last. i have had no sexual relations since. i don’t claim to be a perfect celibate as i was in the early days with doug as a buddhist, but i don’t engage in any interpersonal relations and try to limit my exposure to any temptation whatsoever.

i had continued in recent years to frequent a bar where i read my poetry publicly, and i still have friends from that environment, but i limit myself mostly to appearances in periodicals and an occasional coffeehouse reading. i have been able to self-publish a book of my poems on the internet, have put together another collection for eventual publication, and am now deeply into this memoir which if it serves no other purpose has shown me how fortunate i am to be alive and reasonably sane and entirely clean and sober. i’m on remarkable new psychiatric medications which have certainly had a lot to do with my progress. i may have more to say about a lot of these events as i rewrite and edit, but i think the basic outline of my story is now clear. as jerry garcia once sang, “what a long strange trip it has been”.

i have attempted to sum up this narrative a number of times. it seems to move at a rather fast clip and to repeat itself cyclicly at stages. it reminds me of the whirlwind trip across europe which takes place, i think, in laurence sterne’s sentimental journey or the famed “english mail coach” essay perhaps by thomas dequincy who certainly had his own problems with substance abuse. i cannot overemphasize the cathartic experience of having written so much of my life down on paper. i feel genuinely relieved of most of the guilt and misgiving which has surrounded these subjects in my mind for so long. if my fondest dream were to come true, i would now become a succesful writer, and even at this late stage in my life, marry for love, if not to have children, at least to have companionship and intimate sharing in my remaining years. of course, there may still be much ahead for me. i would like to travel again, if my health permits, and there is my life with mother which may still turn out to be my final chapter. at any rate, the gratitude i express is genuine, the peace i experience is palpable, and i hope none of you ever encounter some of the horrors i have seen, or if you do, that my own survival may be of some comfort and encouragement. God bless His holy universe. we are truly made for the praise of Him.


coda 2010

since this memoir was written i have moved out of the apartment on saint juliet and am living with my 89 yer old mother and our little dog, mia, in an apartment in westcliff above the tcu neighborhood. i live right behind my old junior high, and within blocks of my elementary school. i expect to start reading poetry in public again soon, at a coffeehouse not far from here. life is good if sometimes somewhat hectic. we still go to the episcopal church, although there is a large roman catholic parish down the street, and i very well may eventually gravitate back in that direction. i am celibate and drug free, except for my necessary medications. i occasionally see a few friends from my high school days, and spend a good bit of my time at the library downtown. i listen to a lot of classical music and some contemporary christian albums. i try to stay close to God, at least in so far as i understand Him. my reading is mostly the Holy Scriptures and commentaries thereon. i take the scriptures very seriously, and believe them to be the Wod of God. if i have difficulty with a particular passage, i humble myself and seek guidance. i rarely find serious obstacles. life is fairly peaceful now. i really love being with mother, and mia is a joy to both of us. i am writing a series of poems about the three of us which i intend to call “mama, mia and me”. i pray for peace and happiness, and so many of my prayers have been answered, i live with faith for all the rest. as tiny tim like to say, God bless us, every one.


2012. mother and i are still in tcu. i see gerald tubbs now who is out of prison. i'm a lay reader in my church. i do a lot of collage and write a lot of poetry. these are very good times. i stay busy. i am at peace.

2013

mother had a little stroke last summer. she is largely recovered, if somewhat dysfunctional at times. we have a car. i am driving again. i have left the episcopal church and attend saint andrew’s roman catholic parish down the block from me. i still take mother to trinity episcopal church on sundays. i seem to be making a lot of progress. I read mostly philsophy now and history of philosophy. i realize more and more how little we actually know about reality for certain. i depend upon my faith for guidance. as the apostle ppul wrote, “we walk by faith and not by sight”. there is always hope, even for the spiritually blind.

i think perhaps i should also add that i do take a very light dose of psychiatric medication daily, and that i work more or less constantly and consistently to perfect my celibacy until that day i still hope for when i will possibly marry, and marry within the laws of my church.. i don’t take my sobriety for granted either, but i feel more secure than ever in that. perhaps it is the greatest gift i have, that and the gift of faith which i treasure above all the rest. i never tire of thanking God.