1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  About that time a batch of Stanford clinical acid arrived from Charles Silverberg just a few months before he killed himself with a shotgun at age twenty-two when his girlfriend called off the romance. She was forty-two, so the romance was mostly his. She showed him a few things he’d never imagined much less seen with a coed. He was in love. She was more practical, albeit amused with such a witty, feisty little guy. For all we knew, she had his best interests at heart. But probably not. Charles was way too crazy. He looked crazy, his yellow orange hair sticking out like he had his finger in a socket, his woolly eyebrows and bulging eyes and shit-eating grin made him look crazy and hungry for more. Well, she showed him a crazy thing or two.

  Charles wore his love on his sleeve as he freely told of the crazy times they shared and the shit she pulled in the craziest places. Rod Stewart sang a song about Maggie May, which was unreal, because it was late September, and Charles really should have been back at school. Charles was a medical student at Stanford and knew the guy in the lab who mixed up the lysergic acid diethylamide. Talk about a fur piece from Ray Haney’s baggy full of purple powder; this stuff had lift-off smooth as comet dust on a clear night and leveled at sixty thousand feet above the earth like an orbit in an overstuffed chair. Oh, we saved the Stanford clinical for special occasions or Saturday.

  We fairly envied Charles, what with a full grown, full blown, no holds barred woman to have his way with and better yet to yield in every way to her way. What a marvel is the human mind, and a more insistent marvel is what a young man takes to be his mind. We assumed everything, including the wrecked bed and difficult mornings, when she did kick him in the head.

  That Stanford clinical acid introduced us to acid potential—and, as they said in mid-Missouri, it “plumb ruint us” on the regular stuff for ever more. High quality was a standard that would not be met again, but doors appeared to open.

  Three weeks after returning from Europe I got a call from Betty Boop. We were friends. She was engaged, untouchable and way too beautiful to blemish with sexual abandon but she needed a study date. I felt lucky; we had big tests coming up in American Realist Literature, requiring insight and analysis of Mark Twain and Henry James. We also had Shakespeare, the comedies. Betty sighed: at least we didn’t have the tragedies. Boy, they were really tough. I knew she could walk me through to the C that would avoid the jungle war.

  A few study dates later, Betty sighed again, recalling the process of choosing the right study partner. Youthful lovers like to remember the formative phase. She said it was my style, the boots and jacket and honesty, however brusque. She wanted to tap into it. I did not reprimand her inverted imagery. I was too grateful tapping in.

  So the weeks passed, studying into the nights. Who doesn’t remember that first blessed visit to the candy shop? Betty stood apart in afterglow, introducing a dynamic aspect to the sexual component of the greater revolution. Good friends could get it on if they wanted to, and it was okay and then some. It was an extension of everything being everything. And they wanted to.

  Was that a simplification of sex without love? No, because I did love her—valued and cherished her. Twenty and beautiful she was easy for a guy to cherish, on fragile footing in the real world, perhaps, but generous in romance. Then came her unique, obscure yet often dazzling wit.

  I did not want to marry her, which she needed someone to do. I would commit to be her one and only forever or until boredom or a dynamic new horizon do us part. Why not enjoy what we had into the foreseeable future? For my part, we should have done so. Why would we mess things up? Marriage? Marriage was for parents. The world was a few years past the archaic social dictum that required married couples to stay together till the principals found somebody else, usually also married. Then came a round of divorces to make way for new marriages. Fuck. We were smarter than that.

  Betty accepted my terms in the short run, so we could build foundations for a more lasting regret. She made me realize what I declined—what I would soon do without. Confidence with her footing as any woman, affirmed by gasps and whimpering, she brought us along in a small step for man, a giant leap for manhood. Beyond the squish and her singular beauty we achieved a rounded exchange. Maybe such frequent frolic indicated long-term commitment, so formalities would be foregone, if only I’d say as much.

  Maybe we’d still be together, despite the odds, but she got married in March on spring break, ahead of schedule. She laughed too loud for comfort on her return, asking, “Why the fuck not?”

  Her boyfriend posed the question first. They were so ready and willing, he said. So, why wait? Why not just . . . get it over with? Repeated to me, the question seemed personal and moot; Betty had moved beyond an answer. I was willing to resume practical relations for mutual relief and the betterment of the world in general but got another laugh, this one short, sardonic and also rhetorical.

  We didn’t learn much that year beyond the stark alternatives that life presented. Campus days could be loved or suffered. My girlfriend could trump all logic in her perverse compulsion to be what her parents wanted her to be—what we, as a cultural force, wanted so dearly away from. My college mentors could trump all instinct by discouraging a natural bent for adventure and settings way out of town. My government could trump all logic in its will to wage war and require my participation.

  One side used duty and patriotism to frame the Vietnam War. The other asserted that the government was largely bought and paid for by corporate interests, primarily defense contractors with billions to lose or gain. The government would make the world safe for democracy—and for mixed free enterprise in lucrative new markets. McDonald’s and Coca Cola were mere icons, like the oil companies for that matter. It was billions in weaponry that had the world by the balls and still does. I chose not to go, not for Dick Nixon or anyone.

  Who would choose to be in a jungle trading fire with someone never met over an ideology applied far from home at best, over mercenary interests at worst? I would not. I would be elsewhere. It was time to decide, because a letter would soon arrive, opening with Greetings . . . That’s how the draft letter began.

  Back in ‘69 at Marcia and Betty’s a month or so prior to New Year’s Eve was another night of nights. We gathered round the tube without the crazy snuggle Kenny Visser would feel up next to the fishbowl. On that night in late autumn we watched the first draft lottery broadcast on TV. The Selective Service System attempted to make the process formal and transparent, to infuse the process with random chance, so the draftees could feel lucky or unlucky rather than simply oppressed. Three old men in suits and a woman with pearls and a hat hosted the ceremony. They’re still viewable on-line, and the grim aspect of the little exercise is still laughable and tragic.

  A nation preoccupied with war got nightly broadcasts with battle scenes, death tolls, exotic names, explosions and continuing bloodlust grist for the media mill. The nation divided further, as it had for the Civil War. Families and friends suffered rifts over Vietnam. People fought over the rightness and wrongness of fighting that war. So the first lottery was neither joyful nor celebratory. Yet it provided relief as intended. Those with numbers within the projected quota cutoff number would be drafted. Those with higher numbers would be spared. The lottery freed half of the military-age males in the country to proceed with their lives, barring unforeseen developments. Freeing up half the vulnerable population served to ease pressure on the Federal government, not nearly as much as the all-volunteer army would do. But the all-volunteer army would take a while longer to figure out.

  A host plucked ping-pong balls from another fishbowl. Each ball showed a number that corresponded to a day of the year. Each day was then recorded in the order its ping-pong ball was drawn, to determine the order of conscription to the United States military draft—the first stop on the journey to the jungle war.

  The third date called was Kenny Visser’s. He smiled, stood and left, as if to pack his bags for the trip.

  I remember Kenny V as a stoned
and happy guy, a smart guy in silver- and purple-striped bell-bottoms and ruffled shirts. He wore his long blond locks in a pageboy and never said no to a reefer, and confided once as we drove from mid-Missouri to Denver in a Volkswagen Bus that sundown was a tough time for him. He didn’t know why, but it made him anxious and depressed, even though he knew he’d feel much better by nightfall. Even that strange confession came with a smile. Kenny was the complete hippy and one of the first guys I knew to cross over quick and clean—over the border to a new life in another country, that is, and cross over from reefer, psychedelics and coed leg to real life with consequences.

  Kenny had another two years of student deferment before his lottery number would take effect, but he left the country soon after his birthday was drawn from the fishbowl, gave up the U.S.A. for Montreal forever or until Jerry Ford issued amnesty. I knew he was headed out and asked him why the rush, when he had another two years of deferment. He said the student deferment was a piece of shit, a waste of time and life, just like school at the State U. Yeah, sure, he was having a great time, but he was hanging out, just this side of hiding out, and he needed to be somewhere he could call home. He wasn’t certain where that would be, but it would be somewhere he wasn’t afraid of being drafted.

  He told me to look around—look at him and myself and all the misfits we hung out with, all of us refugees from a world at war, hiding out on a campus. “College? For us? Fuck, man. We should be out there getting started.”

  He loved hanging out but hated the classes and the hours wasted on empty talk with nothing to teach or learn. He hated school.

  I assured him he’d hate the jungle worse. He nodded—no argument there, but it only boiled down to two choices if you let it. He had a bad feeling about the whole situation—the United States of America situation, that is. Kenny was a conspiracy theorist, often melodramatic and sometimes correct. He proved true to his convictions and spirit.

  He vanished a few months later to Canada.

  It felt like a death in the family. Premature departure made it more poignant, cold and anonymous. One of the guidelines for crossing into Canada was no talk beforehand, no communication or indication after. Close friends disappeared, as if by choice. The Federales went north on clues to bring potential soldiers home.

  The seasoned among us knew that drugs could expand the mind, yet we had to keep that expansion within boundaries, with sustained connection to the non-tripping world we lived in most of the time.

  Obviously, some failures occurred, though acid burnout was mostly attributed to excessive frequency and/or dosage. Both culprits were triggered by the rock ‘n roll mentality of more, more, more. If one hit was cosmic then two hits should have been galactic, or something silly—make that stupid, with nine hits revealing the face of God. So it was. Those burnouts looked crispy—and insane.

  The point was that the drug of the day would magnify many things, so the drug should be avoided if those things were dark, or in any way doubtful, apprehensive or anxious. A situation rife with challenges and complexity should not be compounded with LSD, mescaline, psilocybin or peyote. The alternate realist should wait with faith that happiness runs in a circular motion; in time the circle would come round again to a better place.

  Donovan was soft, nearly quaint, getting it every time. So we waited a while. But how long could we postpone a major distraction, with life already on hold? And what about the boys in the jungle war? They couldn’t very well wait for some blue sky and daffodils.

  It was a time, a time it was and all that with the love all around us and flower power and demonstrations two, three, five times a week, where a college guy could get laid by being draft age and keeping his mouth shut. Joan Baez advised the girls—before the girls became women—to just say yes to the boys who said no, and so they did. It was a political statement, well received.

  But imbalance was the sign of the times in a nation virulently divided. The love-it-or-leave-it crowd could win the scuffle on any given day, and the hippies and war protesters could dominate the airwaves on the next day. This was no yin/yang harmony, because both sides buckled under the yoke of war. A great nation with co-opted leadership was overriding its headlights, barreling down a dead end road. Barry McGuire assured over and over and over again, my friend, that the end was nigh on most AM stations. FM was more lyrical, nuanced and softly threatening with imagery like a hard rain that was bound to fall.

  Most people felt the painful truth, that the eve of destruction had begun, and the hard rain was falling. Bob Dylan foretold the reckoning as well. The hard rain pummeled with rhetorical questions on the whereabouts of a blue-eyed son, a darling young one who was all too easily imagined far away in dire straits.

  Lyrics moved minds. Lyrics infused hearts with pain and suffering in the sweet bye and bye. Creedence also asked who would stop the rain, as the body counts, fire fights, napalm and bombings went on and on and on. Another Dylan lyric effectively captured the mood, the sentiment, the feeling and direction. Jimi Hendrix had the same view from the watchtower, backed by guitar and a haunting voice pleading for a way out of here, immersed in chaos and inverted values, meaning and truth.

  A tough situation bearing down generates anxiety. Richie Havens picked up the pace and touched a nerve in a song called Freedom, repeating the word freedom over rhythm guitar as a concept. Richie Havens pulled no punches, and let it all hang out with handsome Johnny marching to the Concord war with a flintlock in his hand. Handsome Johnny marched to the Gettysburg war with a musket in his hand, to the Dunkirk war with a carbine in his hand and, oh, fuck me, to the Vietnam War with an M-15 in his hand.

  These pages can’t sing Magic Carpet Ride or pound the hard driving downbeat that got us down that dark and lonely road. But we remember. Slinging pizza and beer pitchers at the Hoffbrau House paid a buck and a quarter and hour—that’s a dollar and twenty-five cents, not the buck and a quarter of decades later that could range from a hundred twenty-five dollars to a hundred twenty-five grand, depending on how things played out for any given hippy. Those who sloshed beer or gobbled pizza or sat and stared at the universe unfolding or danced the funky chicken alone in the cosmos—they too were one with those who served, all part of everything as everything. Steppenwolf stepped aside for a crossfire hurricane that gave birth to Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and it was a gas. The toothless, bearded hag was on us. We were drowned, washed up and left for dead—nobody illustrated the agony and the ecstasy better than the Rolling Stones, who put a spike right through my hea-ead.

  Mick got it to a T on what had befallen us and who we’d become. It was a pulse to match, a consensus boiled down to jungle rhythm in defense against a jungle war. It was exhausting, a pressure release in our rebellion that had come to a boil. Arlo Guthrie took the lead from his old man Woody, going against the grain and the law for small victories in ballad form, coming into Los Angeles with a couple of keys—which weren’t keys to the city but kilos, two point two pounds of smokable salvation.

  Hard-driving anarchy was the antidote, and those of the 60s heart and soul know where they were, what they were up to when certain hard-driving rhythms play back.

  Pearl diving was a common job in those days—taking a shift in the kitchen, clearing the plates into the garbage and setting them in the big sink to soak a few minutes before loading the big rack and sliding the load into the commercial dishwasher for the scalding, then pulling the hot rack out to stack and prep for the next wave.

  Sometimes you had to hit the kitchen for some pearl diving if the mescaline was coming on strong. It was enough to make you wonder who in their right mind would pop a psychedelic at the front end of a shift—oh, wait! Did you say right mind? There was the fucking problem! The mind wasn’t right! What a goof!

  The paranoia/hallucination interface could get extreme in a hurry, with nobody watching but you and the ether people. Well, they could gang up too, and sometimes you’d hike on out into the cold, friendly night to get a breather from the chaos, not b
y choice but by necessity. Not to worry, job security was not an issue, because the huge fucking mess would wait right there till you got back, and so would the piece o’ shit job. I hated it but oh, for one more night of it—to feel the juice surge and wane and surge again, to achieve forgetfulness on a hard-driving downbeat in a crowd clamoring for more, as all hands on deck joined the chorus to shout down what stalked us. This was the process of becoming someone else in another time and place facing something other than the future bearing down, dead ahead. Despite our experience with alternate realities, the reality upon us defied our grasp.

  So we reached a might further.

  Soon after the lottery the Selective Service projected a draft quota with a disclaimer that it could not be certain one way or another, but number 195 would possibly fulfill annual needs. The monster would be fed at that point, maybe, but it might need another course or two.

  I drew 198. Dicey. What could you do? Get a job? Draft counselors were listed on a bulletin board at the Commons—I picked one and called. We made a time to meet at his house. How strange, seeking help in the suburbs, penetrating the cul-de-sac, split-level sameness we’d been goofing on those many semesters, parking on the set of Leave it to Beaver, walking through the picket gate and up the trimmed, flowered sidewalk and knocking on the stately front door.

  He opened formally, pointing to his overstuffed living room where real life seemed sparse. His family remained unseen, apparently instructed to stay back while Dad pursued his patriotic calling. I sat, fearful of soiling such a bogus chair. He showed me a paperback book. 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft listed a thousand more or less practical pointers. The cover price of five or six bucks was the same as twenty-five today bucks. He paid, chump change to save a life. He’d plucked my copy from a case of books and folded it back to the 1001st way to beat the draft: