1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  Never mind. I could hit the groove in inner space on the Moody Blues, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe, Joe Cocker, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie or any of them. Or shake a tail feather to Motown or Memphis. I’d visited both and understood the soul groove and the funky groove too. A well-rounded repertoire was invaluable to a roadman going coast to coast, border to border. Insight came easy on an on-ramp in summertime, which felt like another Summer of Love, after all. Watching the world speed by, casting fate to the wind, you could hear reassurance on the breeze, see clouds gambol overhead and know that a ride would come along, likely in a van driven by a sister or brother.

  It would be another two years before America would capture the age we were born to. The boomer wave was the first generation to say that war is bad, that we won’t fight without a direct threat to family or country. We learned this from raising hell and waiting for a ride to the next happening on Ventura Highway, in the sun . . . shine.

  I could sing along with America or the Marvelettes, confident that life would shape up with more and greater insights. In a few rides I got into San Francisco and delivered to a house of many friends, where new friends could crash on a couch. That was cool. Everything was everything, and San Francisco was about as stoned as a groove could get. The house was friendly and tolerant and more or less stoned with an open kitchen and brown rice on the stove and coffee on, and if you could make a contribution, all the better.

  I got warned to look both ways before crossing the street—any street. I sensed an early and rare opportunity to apply my degree and got further warned against stop signs and traffic lights appearing to manage traffic. Do not trust stop signs or traffic lights. The neighborhood had discovered reds, not commies but downers—Seconal—rendering many people numb or half asleep or dead, and some of those people were still driving cars. This development undermined my faith that marijuana and LSD would be our platform of redemption. Downers seemed wrong by sheer logic. How could you get high if you were down? That was tough to figure, considering how many people smoked dope with their downers.

  Still, anybody could see that it took a place like San Francisco for everything to actually be everything, with brotherhood and sisterhood and an entire generation standing against a war so blatantly corrupt. Widespread consensus sustained the values and commitment of the times across the land—the Bay Area land. The spirit was naïve and simple and deadly accurate. Walk out to the road and stick your thumb out. Walk into the kitchen and pour another cup of coffee to perk up for another joint. Walk outside with a paper cup and ask a brother or sister for some spare change.

  It worked, kind of, but broke down substantially with the Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles. The murderers looked, spoke and acted like hippies; hardly the first whack job hippies with delusional psychosis, but their grisly behavior threatened to end the love all around us on a single night. It was official: we were not all brothers and sisters, and the times had begun to change back around.

  The only positive aspect of that cultural milestone was the absence of 24/7 news channels, cell phones and the Internet. It was big news on all three networks for a half hour a day, without horrific images dividing rampantly as aberrant cells and metastasizing through the system.

  Most streets in Berkeley were under construction that summer, torn up with deep ditches for one amazing convenience or another. Dirt and rubble got piled alongside every ditch and diverted pedestrian traffic to spaces available against building walls or weaving around parked cars or into traffic. Traffic sounds and jackhammers allowed murmurs here and there, “Spare change.”

  “Help a brother out.”

  “Got twenty-seven cents?”

  “Speed. Acid. Weed.”

  “Spare change?”

  It was crowded, and the love all around us was hot and tired and pissed off to the verge of violence but not like the jungle war.

  Hardly a month later it was mid-Missouri again with a few more milestones stacked up. Most profoundly, Selective Service said it had not changed its quota projection. It would not, could not guarantee that the quota would not change, but coming on to September felt like the clubhouse turn. A new year would bring a new lottery. Then began the grueling prep for the pre-induction physical.

  Another sign of the times was a few miles outside the town where I’d done my time on the student deferment. Mid-Missouri was rich with beautiful countryside then—what would become the subdivisions and strip malls of the immediate future. But at that time the foothills rolled freely from pinnacles to pasturelands. One place of refuge where some friends had lived for a year or so was a communal setup they called the Farm. The group at the Farm changed occasionally with departures and arrivals but remained constant in bliss and the love all around. Pro rata rent shares varied according to the desirability of a room or outbuilding. Thomas Strong was a strapping, likeable hippy with loving values. He seemed born to bib overalls, a billy goat goatee and a happy approach to life and any tasks—especially a man-sized task. He glowed along with the love of his life, Sarah, a blonde beauty whose energy and good looks focused on Thomas. She could not be near him without hugging him, clinging to him, caressing him. She got some overalls too and added soft patches inside to spare her nipples. Sarah wore only overalls, and the guys could see her breasts as often as not. She laughed, as if at the free flowing love between her and Thomas. He laughed back, so wonderful was the joke they shared. Nobody had to sneak a peak once Johann was born, a good baby by all counts, even with his yen for the tit, which Sarah flopped freely at the first whimper.

  It had been a set piece till mid-summer, soon after Johann’s first birthday, when Dugan showed up. A surly, swarthy hippie with a wild black mane, a shaggy black beard and hairy shoulders, Dugan asked Sarah if she wanted to join him yonder in a field. He had something he wanted to show her.

  Sarah admitted soon after that she really, honestly, could not believe the length, girth and stamina of Dugan’s dick. She said, “I’ve never seen a dick that big. It was scary and so amazing when it fit.” She said she “balled him” as a goof, because he really wanted it, but she would in no way hurt Thomas, who she still loved madly and always would. Thomas hung his head and blushed, maybe in deference to the love all around us that sometimes must be shared.

  Everyone saw where things were going, back to the field and then back to the outbuilding where Sarah, Thomas and Johann lived—on the way to the ditch. Sarah and Dugan laughed at their frequency, saying that sometimes a man and a woman “just have to get the balling out of their system so they can get on with their lives.” Sarah frequently proclaimed her eternal love for Thomas, and soon Dugan did too; Thomas was so loving and so understanding of the harmless nature of the thing.

  Thomas had “split” from the Farm a few days before I visited. I saw him in town, clean-shaved in pants and a shirt and shoes, a circumspect guy whose wife had run off with a freak. He had Johann—Sarah had agreed that Johann would be better off for a time; she was so busy with Dugan.

  Endings seemed more frequent.

  I split for St. Louis, a gray sprawl of suburbs surrounding a hollow core. They built an arch in the center to balance the void. It was something to look at. A classified ad described a job at Laclede Gas Company paying eighty-five hundred dollars a year. I’d never imagined eighty-five hundred dollars much less seen eighty-five hundred. I knew it wouldn’t come in a lump but would be doled out and largely spent in the process on basics like taxes, rent, groceries, insurance and new clothes. I applied. I didn’t get the job.

  Fock! I felt like the guy in The Deer Hunter playing Russian roulette.

  I phoned the girlfriend who got discouraged with my frequent fucker plan and got the nod to come on down to Miami. She seemed lukewarm, like she’d hoped for a better catch but needed rescue at any rate from life with her mother—a dire and aging Republican who would not shut (the fuck) up on the glories of Dick Nixon and the horrors of the hateful hippies.

  I went, hardly expec
ting a family embrace but surprised at the anti-Semitic reception. The girlfriend’s mother had divorced the father many years prior and shared sparse dialogue since. Yet they agreed that Jewish and broke would not do for their daughter. The summary indictment: daughter had fallen victim to the worst combination, and for what? She’d been a pompom girl, which is nearly a cheerleader. She could do better. The mother required that the daughter address her as her Aunt, so men suitors wouldn’t know she had a daughter so old, so men wouldn’t think her so old. The father was born Jewish and fairly defined a certain class of Jew, post WWII, embarrassed by hatred coming his way when, really, he wasn’t like that at all. He’d changed his name to a generic, suburban version unidentifiable as Yidloch, which surely the Fourth Reich would have nailed him on, had it arisen under the light of a single, dangling bulb as the electrodes shot sparks from his sweaty nipples . . . Don’t get me started.

  Meanwhile, the daughter had a job in Miami. I rented a studio in North Miami and two days later she moved in.

  Evenings were best, when the heat slacked off and the geriatrics turned in soon after the early bird specials. We toured the “alleys” on clunky bicycles, stealing citrus and avocados hanging in reach. We rode bicycles to Biscayne Bay to snorkel, my second time since ’55 to revisit another reality only faintly recollected. On the way back we passed a crazy man on the bike path. He looked berserk with urgently wild eyes. A minute later a young woman staggered out of the bushes. She’d been beaten and raped.

  Witnessing a capital crime gave purpose for a while—another beginning on another ending. Detectives called and stopped by to insist on the critical nature of eyewitness testimony on behalf of a rape victim. We had to be sure of the I.D. and sure to follow through, knowing the prosecutor would seek the death penalty. It got so tedious that I turned to a detective slogging through the process and said, “Hey. Are you worried that I won’t want to see this guy burn? It’s not a problem. Okay?”

  “But you said you were a conscientious objector. I mean, that’s why I . . .”

  “Vietnam is not WWII. I’m not a conscientious objector, and even if I was, this ain’t that.”

  They had the guy fingered, picked up and in a line-up in no time. The victim and I scanned all the guys in the line-up a few times and separately identified the same guy. But I got to the courtroom to learn that the rapee had changed her mind; she couldn’t be sure; she’d been so surely flummoxed by the defense. The case was dismissed and the guy walked away.

  She knew he was the guy but got stuck on the death penalty. She got stuck on many people insisting on absolute certainty, because a guy was going to die, and it would be on her. They broke her down. I saw it coming and wasn’t surprised.

  I had a job in North Miami pumping gas and waxed a few cars on the side at fifteen bucks a pop. Shit, six cars a month would cover rent, and the cars lined up for gas and the asking. How perfect could it get? With free fruit and avos and squids at forty-five cents a pound, life wasn’t so bad for the short term.

  The cops came back around to ask if I might have a chat with the victim. Why not? It was brief. I told her I had no doubt on the defendant—he was the guy. I pointed out a few details: the dark, greasy complexion, a single spit curl up front, one dimple, except that it wasn’t a dimple but a scar with a small star tattooed in the crater, evil eyes under bushy, sloping brows. But if she didn’t want to see him die, then she could let him off.

  Between a shit and a sweat herself, she hung her head to ask softly if it would be terrible if he walked and then raped again?

  I said yes, it would be terrible, and we were done.

  It seemed like a waste of time and pathetic. She got raped twice. I sensed something in the making and fed a blank page around the platen to begin. That was tough, waiting and watching, like the words would appear as they had on New Year’s Eve, 1969. They did not appear. Instead America came on the radio to preempt my narrative on social irony with a lyric of greater sadness on a more personal irony. We had loved the road, yet it led us to a dead end, to a place where spirits went away. The key line in Easy Rider was, “We blew it.” And there we were, outsiders in a world growing more practical, idealistic with no prospects at twenty-two, gazing at nothing but arid desert and heat ripples on a horse with no name. America captured every facet of the revolutionary years, even the end song.

  Which just goes to show how quickly an era can end, can fold over into what comes next—how quickly a brain can throw a rod. With comforts met and a reasonably tolerant girlfriend who did not begrudge me every few days, I despaired. Cheap rent, warm weather, free citrus and avocados and semi-regular leg would not last, and I knew it as surely as a fresh page would yellow. Maybe a rapist walking free triggered my personal depression. What seemed more likely was a mutual failure with a wrongful society.

  He Had All the Breaks

  OLD MOM SENT clippings over the years on school peers, each time noting in the margin: He had all the breaks. The breaks included a stable home with adequate money to meet suburban standards. The clippings were invariably about success for one dipshit dullard or another who had feared to step out and risk anything. In routine confinement, furnished, all expenses paid, they lived the norm as expected, waiting to take the family baton.

  Mom could not see the gain in a life of freedom, a life of no regimen. She sent a clipping when Charlie Dunham became president of his father’s company. Charlie was a pimple-faced nitwit whose father died long ago, but the trustees could not give Charlie the helm till he was “ready.” At twenty-two, Charlie got the money and helm. Mom inked in the margin: He had all the breaks.

  Another guy made partner in his law firm where he’d worked since marrying the senior partner’s daughter two decades prior. Yet another guy had a part in a community theater play and expounded on community and theater. Every guy was noted for all the breaks. I went to Sunday school with Tommy Rosen from ’57 to ’62. Mom sent word that he’d made “a fortune” as a CPA and had a heart attack and fell over but would likely recover after having, of course, all the breaks.

  I asked if she admired those forgettable boys. Of course she did; look what they’d done. I asked if she could sense anything, uh, er, boring in what they did. She said, “You’re crazy. You smoke that LSD and take so many risks.” She hung her head on that critical note to allow, “But what you had to go through, with those miserable jobs.”

  I took a lead from Jimmy Levin in cutting Mom some slack. No way could she see the light of the 60s. I could not rub two nickels together and come up with 15¢, but I got by on marginal return. Things can get tough for anyone, and risk remains ambient, because nobody has nothing to lose. A man pays sooner or later, and I paid sooner. The clippings showed no risks. Now it’s later. They’re paying. She shakes her head, still concerned. Old Mom got over no lawyer or doctor in the family but could not value a free spirit who stepped up to adventure.

  Parents of the 60s suffered a split-level, cul-de-sac frame of mind. Many of their children got haircuts and jobs on first reasonable offers. Some offers were wildly lucrative but of questionable ideals. Copping out was idealism surrendering to stability, security and appliances. Many 60s youth co-opted. Some claimed to have fought free of war, not comfort, or that the 60s introduced peace and love as building blocks for a better future. But back then, the future remained on hold.

  I saw Jimmy Levin the day before he died. He was staying at his parent’s house for a while to get his head together and figure out some shit and maybe get his shit together and then maybe get his trip together, you know. I was just back from San Francisco via Taos, and LA and hadn’t seen Jimmy since Boulder, when Stevie Getman got ruffled over balancing his books or some shit.

  Jimmy remembered. We laughed. He didn’t know if Stevie had graduated summer school yet. I was in town a few days and didn’t know what I’d be up to but heard Jimmy was living at his parents’ house. I wondered what that deal was about, so I stopped by for a goof, to smoke a joint and see
what was up. I mostly wanted to see where Jimmy’s wizardry had taken him and how he’d maintained his leadership position on the cutting edge of radical drug experimentation while holing up in suburbia, like the Beaver but with no rules.

  Jimmy’s mother did her best not to look, sound and behave like June Cleaver but failed—couldn’t help it. She chirped cheerfully that Jimmy was “in his place,” the garage, converted with a bed, a small fridge, a table and chair, so Jimmy would be comfy at home, not confined.

  I went on around. Slouching over a bowl of cereal, he slurped from a spoon an inch equidistant from the cereal and his mouth, his head askew to make room for the cat, who sipped the milk more daintily from the opposite side of the bowl with no spoon.

  “Hey, Jimmy.”

  “Hey, man. Want some cereal?”

  “Nah.”

  “I’m into cereal. Do you realize? Cereal, man. It’s too much.”

  “I used to eat cereal.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I might go back to Columbia tonight. Nothing going on here. You got anything going on?”

  “No, man. I heard you were going down to Florida to find your girlfriend.”

  I laughed. “That’s funny. I haven’t heard that yet. I been thinking about it, but I don’t know. Maybe I was thinking out loud.”

  “Yeah. Hey. I got an idea, man.” He sat up to check my reaction to breaking news, that Mr. Jimmy had a new idea, which he considered dynamic, radically forward-thinking and possibly a few inches out front of the cutting edge. “I’m gonna hit some Tuinals.” He didn’t ask me if I wanted to try it with him, because I wasn’t on his level; he knew that and most likely didn’t want to embarrass me with my predictable answer. It was cool; we understood that I’d be welcome to hit some Tuinals with him, but it wasn’t likely in the cards, because I never hit anything, because needles wigged me, whether they were stuck in me or anyone. But it was cool. Everyone knew what level everyone else was on, and what kept things cool was the ultimate freedom from judgment. Everything was everything, and that included the potential to be cool. Jimmy was on the ultimate level with drugs, not only comfortable with any drug in any mode but hungry for something to test, something that might break out, break in, break on through to the other side . . .