Nobody teaches you how to behave in a panic situation like the ABC of emergency resuscitation—where is it when you need it? Why don’t they teach that in school instead of algebra? When we were kids we used to have fire drills, and we were taught what to do in an “air raid” if they dropped the bomb. Put your head down on your desk and fold your hands behind your neck. Crowd control? Not a dicky-bird about that.
It was a no-way-out situation. If you fell over, good luck to you as you’d be trampled underfoot. The chain-link fence was getting closer by the second.
Suddenly, I heard a voice shout, “Waaaalk!”
I immediately came to a halt and shouted, “Waaaalk!”
Everyone who heard the word stopped running and in turn shouted, “Waaaalk!”
Guys charged the posts of the fence with what looked like karate kicks, bending them over so that the fence became like a springboard, with people taking running leaps and bouncing off trampoline-style into the darkness, away from the smoke and chaos. I still wonder who he was, the first guy to yell “Waaaalk!”
SUNDAY, MAY 3
We woke up to the news that there was a total curfew imposed on the whole of Kent. No one could leave any place of residence on or off campus. No matter, there was nothing to do on Sunday anyway.
I wanted to go back to the house on Depeyster Street, but there was the curfew. I snuck out anyway, ducked between houses and trees and made my way back, amazed to see armored vehicles positioned on the corners of the streets. Talk about overreacting!
MONDAY, MAY 4
I was back in my room on Depeyster Street. I told my friend Cindy Hino on the phone that I’d hook up with her later. Cindy almost seemed like a foreigner; not so much because her family was from Japan, but because she was from Pennsylvania. We’d gone to her parents’ house for the weekend once and, to me, it felt like another world. She told me on the phone that there was going to be a “peaceful protest” early afternoon, so I’d see her on the common. Today was mid-term and assignments and portfolios were all due to be handed in, so everyone would be there anyway.
Anyone who lived in Kent was heading for the common. No one wanted to miss the protest, and we were all anxious to have a look at the scene of Saturday night’s fire in the daylight. The atmosphere was charged. We felt good about making our view on the war known. Our voice mattered and we felt at one with our brothers and sisters across the nation. Right on!
The grassy, rolling common was teeming with students. I’d never seen it so packed. I couldn’t even make out what was left of the burned-down ROTC building. I pushed my way through the crowd.
Then I heard the tatatatatatatatatat sound. I thought it was fireworks. An eerie silence fell over the common. Then a young man’s voice: “They fucking killed somebody!”
The quiet felt like gravity pulling us to the ground. Everything slowed down and the silence got heavier. Minutes passed—and nothing. Then the sound of a siren. An ambulance was cutting its way through the crowd.
I could see it. The ROTC building, now nothing more than a few inches of charcoal, was surrounded by National Guardsmen. They were all on one knee and pointing their rifles at…us!
They looked freaked out. What happened? Angry students had been throwing stones at them and shouting, “Fuck off—get off our campus!” Then they fired.
By the time I made my way to where I could see them it was still unclear what was going on. The Guardsmen themselves looked stunned. They were still surrounding the burned-down building. What had they been guarding? There was nothing to protect; the ROTC building was gone now. Why were they there? Were they ordered to fire loaded rifles into the crowd? That couldn’t be possible. No.
We looked at them and they looked at us. They were just kids, nineteen years old, like us. But in uniform. Like our boys in Vietnam.
There was a sense of incomprehension wherever you looked. I sat down on the grass. Teachers were telling everybody to leave. I wasn’t leaving. Some men picked me up. I sat, cross-legged and rigid, as they carried me away. I still didn’t understand. But it was time to go. School was over.
Cindy Hino’s boyfriend, Jeff Miller, was staying, though. He couldn’t get up from where he was lying, facedown, the blood leaving his lifeless body and flowing into the nearby gutter.
11
NORTH OF THE BORDER
The KSU campus was totally evacuated within twenty-four hours. Students lined up at the entrance ramps of the interstates, hitchhiking back to New York or Pennsylvania or wherever it was they were from.
There were investigations, but I don’t think anybody ever discovered exactly why the Guardsmen were armed with loaded rifles. Or why they were guarding the charcoal remains of a building. Or why they fired into a crowd of civilians for throwing stones. It still remains a mystery, as far as I know.
A couple of weeks later on the radio, we heard a new song by Neil Young, “Ohio,” about the horrible event. That made us feel better; we needed to be acknowledged. I knew Jeff had been a fan of his, so I was happy that Young had become our spokesman, our voice. It was a big element in easing us out of shock.
I’d moved back to my parents’ house. The deal was that we were supposed to finish the spring term at home and send our assignments in. It was pretty safe to assume that arrangement wasn’t going to work out for me. I couldn’t get my assignments done at school, so I certainly wasn’t going to on my own without someone standing over me with a stick.
I met up with the one guy I could hang out with from Firestone. Chris was an intellectual, straight-A type and dug all the same music as me. He was home from Urbana, where he was at college, but now it was summer so school was out for everybody. We listened to the Beatles and to John Lennon’s new solo album a hundred times. Chris played guitar and was good at art.
We embarked on our own summer of love, smoking lots of pot, listening to music, and hanging out with Chris’s older sister Pat and her boyfriend, Dick. They were all brainy psychology majors who talked endlessly about Freud. We smoked our brains out and I heard the phrase “In the final analysis…” a lot. It was the first time I’d ever hung out with people older than me. Pat and Dick must have been twenty-one. Adults! They were fun, and they liked having me and Chris around as sidekicks.
We got this idea to take off and hitch rides around Ontario, so I lied to my folks and said I was going up to see a friend whose family had a cottage in Port Carling. I hated lying to them but if I’d told them what the real plan was, well, let’s just say it was better not to tell them. For a start, my hitchhiking habit would have pushed them over the edge. And Chris had long hair, so they didn’t like me hanging out with him.
Pat and Dick gave us a ride to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. Exciting! As a going-away treat, Dick did a planche for us on a pillar right there in the airport. He was a gymnast too when he wasn’t rolling joints and talking psychology.
We exited the airport in Toronto and stuck out our thumbs. Dharma bums! We got as far as we could before it got dark, then bought a loaf of brown bread and a round of Gouda cheese sealed in red wax. That was a new thing to me, like yogurt; I’d never seen these exotic foods growing up. Even whole-wheat bread was a relatively new thing. Then we pitched our little tent in a local park and crashed out.
We kept going, going nowhere. I liked the feeling of that. Someone on the road gave us a phone number to call if we got back down to Toronto. We hitched rides and it was easy, as we had practically nothing to carry. The tent just hooked onto Chris’s or my belt. We had a Bunsen burner but that was about all.
I loved Canada, and I was especially happy to get back to Toronto to walk the city streets surrounded by other people doing likewise. It was everything I’d been missing in Akron. It wasn’t a small college town like Kent, either; this really was a big cosmopolitan city.
We called the number we’d been given on the road. A woman answered the phone, and we asked if we could crash there. She sighed and said she was at the end of her tether with the constan
t people traffic in her place, but then she asked us what signs we were. When we told her we were both Virgos she changed her tune and asked us to come by, saying she needed some Virgo energy. Proper hippie.
Georgia Ambrose had dark skin, blonde hair and green eyes. She wasn’t white but it was hard to tell which races she was mixed with. She was definitely the most exotic-looking person I’d ever seen—beautiful, in fact. She was a jazz singer and held regular Buddhist meetings in her big, rambling wooden house on Wellesley Street. A ton of people would arrive and chant “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” while Chris and I sat in the kitchen, listening. It was all new to me. I thought it was the best place I’d ever been. But the thing that impressed us the most was that Georgia Ambrose was about to have a birthday. To our total disbelief she was over thirty!
My parents would have gone nuts if they knew I was hanging around all this Buddhist “malarkey,” not to mention the rest of this “Port Carling” vacation I was on. But I wanted to stay.
We rented a little apartment. It was empty but for our two sleeping bags. We got a couple of mugs and plates, and we had the Bunsen burner, of course. There was no money left out of the hundred or so dollars we’d been living on, but I saw a “waitress wanted” sign in an Indian restaurant, went in and applied for the job. They offered to hire me! I’d never been to or eaten in an Indian restaurant before, so I was thrilled for an adventure. I was all ready to start my new life in Toronto.
Chris wasn’t so keen, though. If he stayed in Canada he’d be a draft dodger and never allowed back into the States. I was pretty sure that if I were a guy I’d be going for the “conscientious objector” option—draft dodger, whatever you want to call it. But I wasn’t a guy so it wasn’t my call. Naw, my parents would have died of shame.
That was the only time in my life that a guy would make a decision for me, although I totally supported Chris so I guess it was mutual. We went back to Akron, the two Virgos, and then it was our turn to have our birthdays, both nineteen. Time was always running out.
—
The autumn quarter started and it was business as usual for everyone in Kent. Well, except for the four who got killed and the nine injured.
There was still one major problem that had to be addressed in my “any experience is better than no experience” theory. I had to get rid of my virginity.
I’d put it off so long that it was becoming a hassle to think about. And even more than experience, not being hassled was consideration numero uno to a pothead.
It’s not that I wasn’t sexually motivated. I was a hot little number, but all the heat was in my head and focused primarily on a turntable. Still, I can’t remember having sexual fantasies about actually getting it on with one of my rock-star heroes. I wanted to be them, not do them.
I think starting out with LSD and graduating to sex was a good way of approaching the subject. I’d already found that being in love wasn’t dependent on receiving treats in the sack, or whatever went on in there. My love affairs had been loftier than that.
S. Clay Wilson’s sordid fantasies in Zap Comix had rather dispelled any yearning to manifest lust in my search for eternity. Having a slathering demon ramming his engorged, vein-strangled four-foot-long tool up my nether regions wasn’t the turn-on that listening to Robert Plant screaming down a mic was.
I had wanted to keep the whole process at bay, where it wouldn’t get in the way of fine guys like John Hammond singing about it, but the time had come. It had to be dealt with sooner or later. And it was getting later.
Procreation was by now not part of the equation to us little nature lovers. We didn’t even know we were confused. We were just trying to keep up with the illustrations of orgasmic ecstasy we saw on all those “Hallelujah the Pill!” posters: the naked, flowing-haired priestess of love on her knees, head thrown back, howling at the moon while straddling some scrawny, bearded eager-beaver who couldn’t believe his luck. Variations of which found their way onto the walls of head shops coast to coast. It wasn’t porn; it was free love. Hallelujah!
We’d been conditioned to think that multiple partners was a form of liberation and that not getting attached to one person was freedom. The well-documented and historical notion that the heart wants exclusivity wasn’t acknowledged at all. Marriage was considered as something arcane, a product of the establishment—something your parents did.
I’d been shy of bodily functions from the get-go. My first period had been a huge blow to my self-esteem. Becoming a woman was an obstacle that had horrified and dogged me throughout my teens, but I wasn’t a guy and I was never going to be a guy, which I had to accept. That meant I’d probably never play guitar in a band, so the worst part was already taken care of.
Sex. In movies there was always a smoldering build-up until two bodies touched and the flame ignited. I’d seen it happen like that on film, but never like this.
My first encounter was a different cinematic animal altogether. In fact, forget the animal part. I accepted an arranged meeting via letter: “Do you have any objection to having sexual intercourse with me this Thursday?” It was clinical and just marginally more sexy than two chimps grooming each other.
The “union” was, in short, not very successful. And, although in the words of Iggy Pop, you could eventually “drive a truck through it,” my unused birth canal couldn’t really accommodate what the quota turned out to be. It was, however, a start. Now that I was released from the worry of how to ditch this last obstacle in the way of my hippie aspirations, I was free to roam.
I was still too shy to approach, seize, collar or consider a sexual conquest, though. I didn’t know how to flirt or chat up and I wouldn’t know if a guy was coming on to me if he had his cock out with a green flag tied to it. But not to worry. We had drugs for everything now; it was just a matter of finding the right one to assist me in my quest for sexual liberation, which would turn out to be more a form of enslavement in time, but, hey—we were so in love with drugs that we were about to turn sex into one of them.
I just needed to delve into my rudimentary knowledge of herbs and pharmaceuticals. Starting with the Pill. Well, yeah! This is what made it all possible. Keep poppin’ those babies and don’t you forget it!
Pot: the great enhancer that only made the mechanics of sex more abstract and unworkable as I froze in the hold of utter paranoia, wondering if my body was normal. Pass.
LSD: This rendered almost any physical endeavor impossible. Even changing a record on the turntable could take the better part of an hour, three-quarters of which might be spent marveling at the prismatic color arrangements dancing around the wave-like grooves of the LP as it melted, mutating into something breathing and slithering up the spindle of the turntable. That could take all day. I’d think twice before accepting the challenge of a flaccid dick taking off into full erection and disappearing up me in that state. Are you kidding me? Pass.
Cough syrup: not an aphrodisiac and left the user pretty goddamn happy to sit in a chair and watch dust drift and float around the room for entire afternoons. Pass.
Opium: Well, when you shut your eyes and find you’re driving a nifty little sports car at high speed only to wake back to reality when a brick wall approaches, no, you’re just too stoned. Pass.
Mad Dog 20/20, or MD 20/20 to us, the wino’s tipple of choice: If you can approach a total stranger in a smoky bar at two in the morning who’s having trouble lighting his own cigarette because he’s trying to light the filter end he’s so fucked up, and still find him attractive enough to say, “Hey, daddy—whatcha got in yer pants there—anything for me?” you know you’ve found the key.
It’s alcohol, folks! Bingo!
And basically that’s how we became champions of the universe, sexually speaking.
12
SOUTH OF THE BORDER
I can’t say I was overjoyed to be back at Kent after the possibility of a life in Toronto, but I rolled with the punches.
I found a nifty little place to live in a tiny co
nverted garage in the alley next to the A&P, Kent’s main grocery store. I painted the walls, as always when I got to a new place. I did like painting; I loved holding a brush, just not for school. Maybe I’d become a painter like I always thought I would; a painter and decorator, at least.
I was back on Water Street hitting the bars, a little more jaded than the flower child who breezed through the year before. Everyone drank White Russians, Singapore Slings or Tequila Sunrises. Liquor was obviously easier to get than anything else so we were all becoming drunks. Bad system, but what could you do?
On the weekends Stella and I would get up on the tables in the Pirate’s Alley and dance, waiting for some outsider, some sucker, to buy a round. Drinking was a new high for me, and I discovered that if I was drunk enough I could pick up a guy. I’d never be able to do that if I wasn’t loaded. I was still shy, but nothing five shots couldn’t fix. I’d wait till the end of the night and see who was left in the bar. Pretty rank, really. But I wanted to be sure I was normal, or at least try to find out. I didn’t really care about the sex—more the adventure—but I was hopeful it might live up to its reputation. Still, who didn’t agree that one-nighters were never very good? Men, that’s who. Well, “any experience is better than no experience” was my motto.
By the time the booze allowed me to get “restless,” I wouldn’t remember much anyway: sloppy, not skillful; never any complaints, though. Oh, men didn’t care about that, and I was getting my experience and I wanted more.
I had one friend who was an out-and-out sex fiend—she couldn’t get enough and didn’t need alcohol to drag anything with a schlong on it back home and into the sack. But I was in it more for the thrill of the unknown without being too bothered about the how or why or what. I guess I was a bit like her when I think about it. We were all still in “free love” mindset, but it was definitely starting to turn.
I liked getting stoned but you could get really fucked up on booze as I was finding out. Never mind cocktails, I was happier knocking back straight tequila; it was a lot more to the point, and I’ve never liked fuss of any kind. I wasn’t very good at moderation, either. I’d trained myself to need the rush of the rollercoaster in everything. That was what we were all into: overdoing it. You think you love it but the truth is that it loves you. I was just getting wrecked, more than anything. There was nothing high about it as time went on. Booze. Just an addiction any way you cut it.
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 8
