Farm New 07-29-07

A Tween

A 'Tween' is a person generally over nine and under fifteen. Tween girls can be delightful, even though they are rapidly moving to the insanity of adolescence. This past week one of my nieces, a Tween, visited for a few days. She lives in the city and has few opportunities to be in a rural setting. The first day she had Suzette's four bunnies all trained to be carried around in your arms, a basket, and any other way she wished. The bunnies all sit quietly and submit to her attentions. Amazing. I like bunnies but I don't enjoy spending the amount of time with them that it would take to tame them like that, so I greatly appreciate the efforts of various Tween girls who help me with gentling the bunnies.

1966

In the fall of 1966, through a series of poor decisions by all involved, I was supposedly leading a Western Civilization class at the University of Kansas. I had never taken a class on Western Civilization, nor on any other kind of civilization, but I was supposed to be leading a group of freshmen honors students through the literature of our civilization. About the only thing I knew for certain about our civilization was that, if I noticed an atomic bomb had just vaporized the city, I should crawl under the nearest desk and cover my head with my arms. It's no wonder I considered the writings of Camus to be a survival guide. The students in the class were all bright and I was looking forward to the point where we would reach the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I then considered to be an insightful commentator on Western Civilization. Alas, I didn't make it that far.

One evening after class a young woman who seldom said much during discussions handed me a few sheets of typewritten script and said, “I think you need to read this.” She was right, I did need to read it. It was a description of her first experience with something called LSD. FM radio was just beginning in 1966 and much of it was free-form radio, whoever was playing the music played whatever struck their fancy, especially on student radio stations. I was sitting in front of the radio, reading the young woman's paper, and listening to a piece by Wagner. The Wagner piece ended, and the next thing played was a piece called White Rabbit by a band called Jefferson Airplane. Well, I was not the sort of person to ignore a Karmic directive like that: I decided to put a flower in my hair and go to San Francisco. Jack Kerouac had been there, and the guy who wrote A Coney Island of the Mind lived there. Now it was my time to go there.

Most people who were going to San Francisco that year went by plane, train, bus, or thumb in the most direct route available. For me, though, this was to be a spiritual journey and the most direct route did not necessarily always head west. So, I went to San Antonio, Texas, where I spent a few weeks working on a film crew making an educational film for the Air Force. The job put enough money in my pocket to make me comfortable continuing on my journey, so I went to Monterrey, Mexico, and spent a week in a whorehouse. Spiritual journeys are like that, sometimes.

Across the desert on a bus filled with chickens and people, through Chihuahua, and up, up, up into dry mountains where tiny villages crouched among the boulders. I feasted on goat, beans, and beer in nameless places and began to fill my soul with emptiness. I spoke no Spanish and, after leaving Monterrey, I didn't find anyone who spoke a language I understood, except for Albert Camus. Silence among great stones helps pour emptiness into the soul, the kind of emptiness that forged Meursault's understanding. I chewed on goat ribs and tossed scraps of food and reason to the young pigs basking in the doorways of dirt-floored mud and wattle huts.

Down, out of the mountains, west to Mazatlan, and then north, along the Gulf of California, through Hermosillo, and on to Tijuana. Tijuana had nothing I needed or wanted, the dry stones had filled those parts of my soul with emptiness. All I could do was stumble along with a relentless force pushing me north until I arrived in San Francisco. I knew only one person in the San Francisco area, Jill. We had been lovers ten years earlier, in 1956, when she was 17 and I was 19, and, ten years later, although I wasn't invited to share her bed, she kindly invited me to share her apartment until I could find a place of my own.

A month or so later, I had a job in San Francisco (Jill lived in Redwood City), and was ready to find a place in the city where something was about to happen. The place I found was a tiny four room house located in an alley in the Mission District. The Mission, generally considered the armpit of the city, has the best climate north of Carmel. Our house was tucked in an alley behind a row of two-story apartment buildings. In that sheltered environment, quite and neighborly, it was the little house where four hippies moved in.: Wheezy, one of the seven trolls of Gnarled Garlic, his fat girlfriend (an artist of some sort), a skinny old bag in her early twenties with the disposition of elderly alcoholic waitress, and, me. Most of the neighbors were Russian, or Chinese, or a mix of those two, some with Hispanic ancestry blended in, a large family of Rom, and some Filipinos, and then, some hippies. Everyone seemed pleased enough to have their own neighborhood hippies. We kept an eye out for the kids playing in the alley, who kept their eyes on us, finding us something akin to a reality TV show playing live in the alley. It was a harmonious neighborhood.

Early in our occupancy Ducky, the fat girlfriend, painted a slice of bread with pink, glow-in-the-dark, paint and then glued the slice of bread to the living room wall where it hung, a protest against crucifixion, attracting more cockroaches than can be found in Jerusalem. At night we sometimes sat in the living room with all the lights off, smoking dope and watching cockroach shadows walk back and forth over the glowing surface of the bread. We didn't have a TV, but, being good Kansans, we knew how to improvise.

Ellen, the skinny old bag, used that room as her bedroom, forcing her to sit through more evenings of late cockroach gazing than was good for her, further bending her natural predispositions into constant state of surly, snarling, cynicism. Both of those women dropped out of early training just after the part where they learned to use toilets instead of diapers. They were two of the sloppiest people I have ever known. Allow me to give an example.

One evening, after a nice session of cockroach gazing in the living room, we turned the lights back on and began to do all that sorting out business people do when the light comes back. Ellen, who never fussed about with stuff in the light or dark, was semi-recumbent on the most comfortable chair in the room, a small table to her left holding her cigarettes, a lighter, and a large ash-tray piled several inches deep with cigarette butts and a half empty mug of coffee that she had poured several hours earlier.. Ducky held up a joint, smiling that special way fat women can smile, and everyone promptly arranged themselves in a circle, sitting quietly with their hands in their laps, products of Kansas Kindergartens, sitting nicely and waiting for the joint to come around. Ellen, immune to any social nicety, turned to her left and knocked the over-full ash-tray and the half-full coffee mug off the table. Ellen sat up straight, looked down and to her left at the mess, and said, slowly and with much feeling, “Oh, God.” She stood up, walked into the kitchen, sat down in a unmated kitchen chair, lit another cigarette, and glared at the pile of wet ashes on the floor for a few more moments, before muttering, “Oh, God,” again slowly and with much feeling, before she picked up a magazine and started leafing through it.

Wheezy did wheeze a great deal, sibilant songs of asthma. Ducky took up any energy he had left in the bedroom every night, expending hours of moaning, shouting, crying prayer trying to exorcise his demons. She was raised in one of the churches that believes in faith healing and such and she seemed to think curing Wheezy was a task set for her faith. I thought it was somewhat unkind to call him Wheezy, but none of us could ever remember his real name, so Wheezy sort of stuck. Anyway, given that he was living with Ducky, and given the way that Ducky was trying to cure him, it was hard to have much sympathy for him. A blues singer, I don't remember her name but do remember that she was a substantial woman who put everything she had into her music, had a song out called Ride Your Pony. It wasn't suggestive music, it was downright explicit, and I could hear it playing over and over in the next bedroom, separated from mine by a curtain that would sometimes start gently waving with the rhythm.

We were blessed with good public transportation to Haight Street and the Golden Gate Park, where something was going to happen very soon. Given a secure base from which to venture, we four Kansans went about exploring in the areas where something was about to happen: Haight Street, Golden Gate Park, and our minds. Each night, as we grew weary of the crowds, we would head back to our nice little house in the Mission, where an Apricot tree was growing in the yard, one branch inching it's way into my bedroom through an always open window. Oh, how I dreamed of seducing young, pretty, hippie girls on that bed under an apricot branch in full blossom.

Actually, none of the pretty, young hippie girls magically materialized in my bed, nor did I have any success in getting them there by the more traditional methods. I was recently divorced and had a decent job, qualities that shouldn't appear all that bad to a nice hippie girl hunting for someone to snuggle up to on cold nights. The nights were cool, thanks to the window that stood open to admit the branch of the Apricot tree; good God, all that and still I couldn't get laid. At that time I was still in the healthy adult male hormonal state, which means that being horny was constant. Not getting laid, after about six hours, can move healthy adult males to deranged behaviors.

Just as the two women weren't bound by habits of any sort of housekeeping, none of us seemed have many inhibitions in our repertories of public behaviors, nor did the thousands of hippies who were beginning to stream into San Francisco. The whole world had been invited to a fanciful costume party in the only city in the world that could handle such a gathering. On Sunday afternoons Golden Gate Park and Haight Street were densely packed collections of hippies, all in their best, and often only, costumes.

It was sometime during that period that I developed the habit of taking LSD every Sunday morning, cleaning up the kitchen, and then perhaps going to the Park. I had finished the geographic portion of my journey, now it was time for movement on the psychedelic axis, the one that goes up. I can't remember the exact date when all that started, but it was the day something happened.