1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  “Why not?”

  “I’m Jewish for starters.”

  “So was Jesus.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Not like what? Jewish is Jewish. He was. You are. I don’t get it? What’s the difference?”

  “Jews don’t proselytize. Jews have no missionaries. Converting to Judaism isn’t easy. It’s very difficult.”

  “You wouldn’t be proselytizing. Or converting. Or preaching anything Jewish. Or Christian. You’d be talking happy hope and glory. You’d be selling! I’ve seen you sell hot mud for chrissake!”

  “We never actually sold any.”

  “But you weren’t afraid to ask for the money! You weren’t afraid to have some fun and share it! You think you might sell some light and hope? You think a Jew ever sold anything?”

  “Yeah, they have. That could be another problem.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. It just came out wrong.”

  “It usually does. I just fairly well know how it would end up.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to do it, that’s okay. I’d always feel remiss if I didn’t run it by you. It’s a winner. You could be a winner, if you’d let it happen. I haven’t picked too many, but this is one of them.”

  “You do it.”

  Geoffrey lit his pipe again, blew out the match and shook his head. “I’m too old. My voice sounds old. I can manage and I can coach. This calls for youth and a natural instinct. This calls for skills you might take for granted, but I see what they are. You could say the same things I could say, and people would smile for you but raise an eyebrow for me. Like I say, you’re young, and you got it. Maybe I’ll find somebody else. You never know.”

  It didn’t grab me but I promised to think it over, and so I did, seeing myself in the chips, which didn’t seem like a goof but could have been a cop out—going on the radio to say things I didn’t believe to a people I didn’t care about or like in exchange for money. It seemed calculated and cash based. I wanted no part of it, except for the money. The money would change everything.

  Legions of draft age guys with no deferments passed the military physical in 1970 and waited the death knell, Greetings . . . War anxiety infused the first round lottery crowd with a pandemic of dark spirit. Into that cloud Geoffrey Wendell had planted a little seed that germinated to a vision. Imagine a right bona fide longhair with a penchant for improv. Just add money and you get way out front of the hot mud crowd. You get the farm, all new, with mobility and freedom, which was a delusion to be sure, but a welcome change from so much cultural oppression.

  The problems of rock stardom had not changed over the ages, beginning with bloated self-esteem and skewed values. Geoffrey’s idea changed perception of potential, enhancing our basis for happiness; such is the nature of greed, which is most often self-inflicted. Lust got confused with love. Emotions felt sincere, but new horizons viewed from our cozy attic tended to devalue our idyllic bliss. Pondering money, I believed I had the goods to cash in at any time, no rush. With money available, I could be superior to material needs. All needs would resolve with celebrity, though some needs felt well met at home. I’d never felt this way about one coed, so I presented a plan to shore up the base and keep us calm. It called for optimal sexual frequency. I thought true love warranted maximum potential, by paying attention to the cock—I mean clock. Any healthy young man will affirm that a rest between rounds is essential and can take two to forty-five minutes with about a twelve-minute average recovery. Like time and tide, recovery was a requirement of nature, an interval that must be accepted.

  Ninety-minutes would be conservative, a cuddly interlude deemed mature in some quarters, and a recovery period of an hour and a half would render a brand new boy, ready to mount up one mo’ time for another ride like no tomorrow. I approached fucking—I mean lovemaking—with method, often called methodology in your houses of academia. Make that academiology.

  Never mind. We would do it, wait forty-five to ninety minutes, and then do it again. Round the clock.

  By paying attention we could get in sixteen to thirty-two fucks per day, which wasn’t realistic if we factored eating and sleeping, which could occur in the intervals, but the regimen seemed more reasonable to block off, say, eight hours for personal stuff. Make it ten hours for unanticipated stuff, like a rigorous broadcast schedule. That would still leave fourteen hours, yielding nine to eighteen goes a day. Think of it! God, how satisfying would that be?

  Topping it all off: the money. I didn’t mention the money to my sweetie just yet. I was saving the news of my decision to become a radio rock star for a special celebration.

  The girlfriend looked troubled, annoyed and upset. She walked away, leaving me to wonder what. What?

  Even eight times a day would be better than what we had, which was what? Two? Three? Ah, youth; taut as a drumhead and subtle as a pounding—and soon to be rich, rich, rich!

  She announced soon after that she would head to Miami to be with her mother, and she left. Such was the fickle nature of showbiz. I liked her, supported her and tolerated her quirks. I could not imagine anything long term, but her departure felt like a loss of magnitude possibly greater than showbiz. She humbled me. I had nothing but picking apples and stealing pop bottles, slinging pizza when I could stand it, and roofing until springtime melted into summer. I could meet my pesky needs but felt foolish dragging dates up the staircase and pounding the jam into the floor/ceiling for Geoffrey’s family to ignore like the two hundred fifty pound fuck in the attic.

  It was the best of times and the worst of times.

  Something had to give. Months stacked up, and those of us stuck in the campus/jungle interface felt like sitting ducks. Movement could change things, but the questions of where to go and what to do became circular and migrations became conceptual. The best option to confinement was upping the dosage.

  We could sit and spin, with lyrics to facilitate our lyrical notions. In Mr. Tambourine Man our jingle jangle mornings got validated—as evening’s empire crumbled into sand, and though we were not sleepy our weariness amazed us . . . And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming. I saw Bob Dylan not too long ago. The interviewer asked if he would consider composing more lyrics like those written in the 60s. Dylan said, “No. That won’t happen again.” Is the ancient empty street too dead for dreaming? Probably not, but the singular lyric of the 60s will be a long time coming back.

  Meanwhile, becoming one with the smoke and pale light, we drifted, mostly on short trips around the bend.

  A Flea-Bit Painted Monkey

  ANARCHY IN CONFINEMENT was the Revolution in a nutshell. Young men hung out in university towns waiting to leave for Canada or Southeast Asia or maybe San Francisco. Meanwhile, we raised hell, goofed and made a scene. Or we gazed inward and beyond, wondering what and when. The dream began to end that year. Jimmy Levin failed college because he never went to class. We got by going to the first day of class, maybe a day or two during the semester and showing up for the final exam to fill a bluebook with nonsense. Jimmy was radical, ahead of the curve. Jimmy didn’t fuck with any of that first day, last day, bluebook bullshit. Jimmy laughed, and then everybody laughed.

  The cosmic goof in play was that neither the University nor Selective Service had connected Jimmy’s non-dots. He fell through the cracks. Hardly a year or so later people would describe his life that way, but many thought Jimmy turned into a sunbeam and shined his way out.

  Mick Jagger’s plaintive song of Mr. Jimmy seemed obvious to those of us who knew Jimmy Levin. That was many, many people around campus and uptown. Oh, Jimmy was known. Why wouldn’t Mick Jagger know him too? Mick’s moves seemed to imitate Jimmy Levin in every way. Mick Jagger even admitted to standing in line with Mr. Jimmy. We did not take that as coincidence but we also refrained from discussing Mick’s further revelation that he said one word to me, and that was dead.

  A pioneer of the one-way ride, Jimmy was dead when they found him, cold but smiling serenely, like
he knew, or had known. Jimmy seemed supremely indifferent at the end, when his surly, casual arrogance acquired depth and subtlety into the next phase, his body language softly saying, Yeah? So?

  Jimmy overdosed on downers, Tuinals, which were yellow but weren’t called yellows, not like Seconals were called reds. Both were trademark names, for what that was worth, which was millions to the drug companies and maybe had value for us too as a cultural component of what we’d fled. Or in Jimmy’s case, pharmaceutical drugs were something to goof like no tomorrow. Mick Jagger narrated to a T one more time with Mother’s Little Helper, a rock ode to barbiturates and the blessed acceptance they provided to suburbanites everywhere.

  Chief among the images of the day was Jimmy Levin’s Mick Jagger, with the slink and swagger, hollow cheeks and puffy lips. Jimmy aped Mick down to the hip hugger bell-bottoms with green and pink stripes and paisley usher ribbons down the legs. After mastering every cut on Let It Bleed that spring, Jimmy deferred to stardom with a new pair of pants he wouldn’t take off, because they were leather, and at sixty dollars were known to be “the last pants you’ll ever need!” And so they were.

  Jimmy had zero body fat, just like Mick, though Jimmy stayed skinny by shooting speed, likely far more than Mick ever did, if Mick ever did. Just like Mick, Jimmy let his Elizabethan blouse hang open to show his ribs and concave stomach. He’d hunker down, sink his head into his shoulders, raise a knee and bring it across the other knee as if to counterbalance the emotion within. Pointing a rubbery finger at the future and with the other hand grasping a broomstick by the neck, his microphone, he matched the stereo in perfect synch, proclaiming himself to be a flea-bit painted monkey, proclaiming that all his friends were junkies. It was a lyric. It also rang true.

  And so on through the groove, syllable for syllable, twitch for twitch, short-circuited but young enough to override the system on the polite disclaimer, confusing messianic with satanic, or maybe pointing out the similarity between the two. Oh, it was food for thought, but only for a beat before the next serving, the finale, where Jimmy squealed in a plaintiff pitch between falsetto and a rodent’s death throes that he was, indeed, a mon-keeeeeeeey . . .

  The accompanying percussion and guitar here fairly worked Jimmy like puppet strings in spastic hands, with agony and ecstasy appropriate to the pitch and sentiment of the moment.

  Then he slumped with exhaustion in quick repose between tracks. Next came a ballad, a personal favorite, the one where Mick Jagger obviously had Jimmy Levin in mind for the sad ballad of getting what you need.

  It wasn’t all Stones, though Let It Bleed seemed to connect Jimmy Levin best to how it was. The Stones didn’t exactly replace the Velvet Underground—they couldn’t. The Stones simply went to a new phase, as yet unanticipated. Besides that, Jimmy needed a change from his Velvet Underground accompaniment, in which he and Heavy Greg Buckstein would heat their junk spoons, tie off, find a vein, get the register by drawing a little of the red stuff back up into the syringe, and then hold it right there while somebody—or maybe one of them—would reach over to set the other needle right in the very first groove on the record. Jimmy and Heavy Greg would have about three seconds of hiss, and into that unholy interval they would breathe deep, gather their wits, such as they were, and leap from their perch at the edge of the cliff, into the abyss. Pressing plungers they sent the drug coursing brain-ward. Ideally, Lou Reed came in on cue just as the drug reached the top floor, the Men’s Department: hats, capes, boots and numbness . . . Lou Reed also seemed ambivalent in his reach for the summit.

  Metaphors of the abyss and the summit were not mixed, and anyone who thought they were would only reflect the constraint of a conventional world in which gravity works downward, when in fact gravity and everything that is everything can work whatever way a true player wants it to work.

  And so on to the money lines, leading up to Jimmy’s bliss. Jimmy heard the cue and had the timing down—never mind—he’d come in and fade out, keeping the beat and waiting, anticipating, rejuvenating to the heady downbeat where he would light up with giddy fulfillment. Lou Reed’s lyric deconstructed a single word down to three syllables heh roh win and the meaning of life and death, because death only triggers new life, check it out, let it go, get it on, if you can. A lyric of life beginning with the smack flowing would not be popular these days, possibly not even allowed. But who said the 60s was all sweetness and light?

  Rhythm and rhyme flowed forth so unbelievably, profoundly true, and it was an album anyone could go out and buy and do the same thing with, whether they wanted to hit smack or speed or anything. Who cared which rocket fuel got you into orbit? What difference did it make with no rules anyway? It didn’t, and it couldn’t get any neater than that.

  It did seem strangely practical in Jimmy and Heavy Greg’s hard-drug, rock ‘n’ roll anarchy to save the Velvet Underground’s ultimate cut for special occasions so they wouldn’t get tired of the music—or too strung out on junk. Speed seemed easier to manage, and though the boys would have wilted in their boots at the first suggestion that their approach to partying down like no tomorrow was in the least moderate, they could still survive with honor. So they agreed that hitting speed instead of heroin most of the time for the synchronous beginning of Heroin would keep the Reaper amused but for the time being keep him at bay too. He could be such a rascal, insisting on the constant tease, though everyone knew that’s where he would leap out of his apparent lethargy and take you quicker than snacks on the run.

  Heavy Greg could not handle the idea of shooting LSD anymore than he could see the fun in stepping off the curb in front of a bus. But wait a minute. Greg was no pussy, no way—you think it was for nothing everyone called him Heavy Greg? But that didn’t mean he was crazy. Shooting LSD? Well, of course you could. Nobody said you couldn’t, and everybody knew you could shoot anything. We heard of one guy who shot peanut butter. Peanut butter, man! What a goof. But LSD? That was like, you know, using a Mack truck for a golf cart or a nuclear warhead instead of a cherry bomb or some shit. You know? Man, golf. What a goof.

  Mainlining LSD was Jimmy’s idea, Jimmy’s modest proposal: “Hey. Would it be a fuckin’ goof, man, or what, if we, like, spiked some Owsley or some microdots? Or some fuckin’, some fuckin’ sunshine, man? Uh huh! It’d be like the fuckin’ astronauts, except faster!” Jimmy saw LSD injection as the next frontier—as the ultimate defense against a world gone crazy. Everyone was eating LSD, and that was cool, but that was all it was, all these . . . college kids getting off to get their shit together. Jimmy needed more, something way out front, something to let him hang ten over the cutting edge, something daring, something to wake the Reaper from a sound sleep and slap snot out of that silly fucker.

  Besides all that good fun—on a serious note—Jimmy had responsibilities, like, you know, to think up this shit and then check it out, you know, for the kids. He conjured it one day, looking around for something new to shoot up, till it hit him like a bolt of lightning—the idea of cooking up some LSD, drawing it into a syringe and spiking it. Realization spread across his face in a grin, perhaps in emulation of the grim one himself.

  He called the idea original, or, as he put it afterwards, he invented it. Nobody he heard of had yet hit acid with a spike. Now there was the space shot he’d been looking for. Besides, what could it do to you, take you out six dimensions on a bumpy ride? So? What’s wrong with that?

  So Jimmy hit some acid by himself, like a test pilot, kind of. Heavy Greg worked the record player, because once you hit acid, you can’t really control the volume and wouldn’t be able to tell if it was way up or whisper quiet or if you got it right, really, and if you missed the groove, you’d already be in the heavy Gs, where you could spend a day and night staring at the grooves in search of the lost one. So it was best that he had heavy Greg there to work the controls. Jimmy loved all his music as a parent might love all his children, each for its unique character and lovable quirk. He picked Led Zeppelin to shoot acid
to, You Need Love; it seemed so perfect, and heavy Greg did not blow the mechanicals but got the needle into the groove at exactly the right spot with no scratches and optimal hiss. Jimmy pressed the plunger and slumped into the floor, leaning against the wall, staring and twitching.

  Greg tweaked the treble and bass so the tone was perfect, then he untied Jimmy and laughed, “What’s it like, man?”

  Jimmy’s mouth went all floppy, and he laughed too, kind of, and made some noises but couldn’t talk too well, which everyone thought was similar to Houston Control losing contact with Major Tom. Then Jimmy nodded. He stared at the record player and said, “It’s off.”

  Greg said, “It sounds off. That’s all. You’re accelerating, man. You’re breaking out of suborbital. It’s not off. Get all the way, man. It’s on. It’s right on . . . man.”

  We hung out for a while watching Jimmy get all the way, but then we started getting off too, maybe forty-five minutes later, because we’d only swallowed our acid. Then we drifted apart to roam the Universe. Some of us may still be out there. I think Jimmy might be. A few days later he had Heavy Greg convinced that it was a stoned gas and then some, and maybe, just maybe, anybody who didn’t try it would never know, never experience, which would not do, which is what happened to our parents, and look how they ended up. So they bantered further, working together to get Heavy Greg pumped up to try it. Greg was game, already feeling a little bit second fiddle, with Jimmy telling everyone how it was, and he, Heavy Greg, grinning and nodding like a bump on a log while Jimmy debriefed on his journey to where no human had ever been and returned from: the outer galaxy. “It’s like, man, you’re just sitting there one second, and the next second, you’re like . . . like . . . tripping your fucking brains in two, man.”

  What a nut. But what a dazzling character. Many called him a waste of everything. But he wasn’t. He wasted his human potential in the material productivity arena, but that was exactly as intended, what he wanted most of all. Jimmy set out to blaze the ether. Till the day he died and maybe beyond that, he was a warm, fun loving guy who set himself apart from most humans by making a commitment—not to drugs; they were merely his vehicle. He wanted to be the tungsten in the light bulb. He stood out in the Heart of the Revolution by refusing to resent the seemingly silly, material lives his parents lived, with their suburban needs and fears, their addictions to creature comforts and so-called security, their tastes and fads that looked ridiculous a few years later and were in fact ridiculous in the moment. Jimmy Levin referred to his mother and father as pure parents, as lovable as parents could be, and he openly loved them back, more so for their foibles, which he found endearing and grist for his mill.