Charlie

This section will be written someplace where kids can't read it.

Living with Mom

OK this is really really raw first draft writing. If I were you I'd skip it for a few months until I get it in some conherent form.
... moved to kidless venue

back to Springfield - for a while

moved...

east village life

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The free store and other free things

basement on 6th street

more radio life

moved for more privacy....

radio life

seventy first

Now things get hazy and it's hard to put things in order. Still, this is not history, it is "what it was like" not "what it was". My rambling is not fact-finding. When I have dementia and repeat things, will you say "you said that already"? This is not an essay test. .... moved ....

South Salem I

The Track part 3

sex drugs and rock and roll I

The Track part 1

I had a choice of music school to become a music teacher, or Springfield College to become a YMCA director like my Dad. My Dad was much less neurotic than all the music teachers I knew, so I picked Springfield. Also Jerry S. was going there. Springfield told me I had to lose about 30 pounds and suggested I read Camus's The Stranger. The diet pills I started taking were my entry into the drug world. Camus was the entry into existentialism, which I never understood but I enjoyed it and it made me feel intellectually important. When I arrived at Springfield I was pretty disappointed that few had read The Stranger. I was also somewhat stunned about the hazing of freshman. My parents had taught me that such things were denigrating and I couldn't see what it had to do with academic growth. My Dad had gotten his masters at Springfield a few years earlier and I had studied his term papers. I'd only seen the academic side.
I wore a beanie without complaint and stayed off of "senior walk". I got a job in the cafeteria to help pay for my books. I enjoyed my first class when "Doc" Brainerd stood on the chair and yelled "Biology is the science of life!" and then got off and calmly asked "Did you put that in your notes?" It turns out that Doc Brainerd was the only faculty member who ever referred to Camus during that year.
During the first orientation week, the "girls" under our resident assistant lined up by height to meet her RA boyfriend's students, who were also lined up by height, and we walked to the gym where there was a banquet to welcome us to the college. My partner didn't seem too pleased to meet me and I thought he looked rather spoiled in his baby blue suit ... although I was wearing a baby blue suit too. We seemed resigned to put up with each other until someone in front of us started talking about skiing and then Jim and I discovered a mutual passion. We talked about skiing until we sat down. Across from us was a Japanese-American named Billy K. Billy was an immediate education. His let us know that his parents were civil rights activitists who knew Stokely Charmichael, that his parents had been interred in U.S. camps during WWII (I had never heard about internment camps in school history classes), and that he had smoked pot. Jim and I immediately asked if he could get us some pot and he said it might be arranged.
While I was getting tight with Jim and Billy, I was becoming increasinglly alienated from those in the college mainstream. My roommate took several showers a day, and if we had a fire drill, she'd take a shower after that. I showered less and less. We had an "initiation" where we were blindfolded and ridiculed and made to eat dogfood and such. This was and is known as "tradition". Springfield frowned on fraternities or sororities, but it was known that the Varsity students formed a fraternity and had a house off campus. I visited it when I was invited, out of the blue, on a date with someone I had never met. When I got there, I was pretty much ignored by my date and I chatted with the girls. One of them told me that she also had to lose weight to attend the school. Years later I saw the movie "Dogfight" and tearfully realized that I had been invited as part of a fraternity contest to see who brought the worst "dog" to the party.

That's it for the first draft

I have some things to add, but they are part of the appendix of things written by other people. I'll include my Cousin Edith's letter describing when the Kennedy's used their rest room after the end of a white water race on the Hudson. And then there are things my Dad put to paper about relatives and about his WWII experience. So I've come to the less pleasant part of writing: looking at the thing as a whole, and working on the second draft. The way I'll work on the second draft will be to revise these blog entries ... so I don't think that will show up on facebook posts.

Meanwhile, I think my writing activities will be divided between this and a first draft of something else. I'm thinking a description of the hippy years. In a way, it's sort of embarrassing, but it also may be of interest. Some people will find it boring compared to what they imagined, but others may react differently.

And what a job it will be to write about! I have to keep my modern judgments out as much as I can. Also want to keep out the bragging "dope story" aspect. I don't know if I can do either.

Today I'm thinking about the old friend who died last winter, and I only just learned about it yesterday. This was an old friend I was happy to let go of, but I also had the thought that I'd see him again some day. I don't have an image of heaven as an old time reunion place, so I don't have that expectation. So I'm mourning him and thinking about what I can write about him. I cared about him a lot and had a lot of important experiences through him, but also didn't like him much. He was an amazing conversationalist and could play chords on the guitar and hold his harmony well. He was uncomfortable around me, probably because he knew what I knew about him and knew I didn't much like things about him. He told me a lot of his shortcomings and withheld some that were so huge, I only speculated about them. (I do the same myself - I'll tell you 80% of who I am so you won't find out about the 20%.) We were very intimate, but touched rarely - rather like Robert E. Howard and schoolteacher Novalyne Price Ellis in the movie the Whole Wide World. No wonder I wasn't in contact with him when he died.

Lest we forget

Lest we forget.

I remember when I heard this live on WBAI before it had been recorded. Yeah, I'm old.

taken 2

I'm just squeezing in a little first draft writing time here.
Another time of feeling proudly charitable. In 1969, I moved in with a coworker and another guy. An apartment in a very interesting building in Staten Island (Stapleton Station). I was getting ready to quit my job and go live on a commune. Talk about foolhardy! This may have been the most romantic, foolish time of my life so it is loaded with embarrassment. My stuff: I had a Martin 12 string guitar, a trunk which had my clothes and piano music, a bottle of Joy perfume which I bought hot from a coworker, and a bear skin rug.
Other tenants: a writer who had written a story about a cat that convinced its owner that the end of the world had come, owners of a Manhattan dance studio, and an antiwar activist who was wanted by the FBI. And there was a guy, I'll call him Leo, who occassionally would burst into the apartment. He didn't live in the building, but he hung around and harassed us.
It was a time of self-conciousness about race. People like me tried to maintain at least one black friend. In the case of Leo, folks in our building were maintaining one black criminal. We would not complain about his behavior, because we were doing too much illegal activity ourselves.
I first met Leo when I was tripping on acid and going through Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead . It was sort of a guide to tripping. I had used it for tripping twice before and was "guiding" my roommates through it this time. We were sitting in the kitchen area when a very dangerous looking black guy with knife burst into the front door. He started to say threatening things and I decided to take things in hand. In my most halucinogen induced enlightened state of mind, I asked him what he needed and what could we give him. I thought I was doing pretty well when he suddenly turned my perception upside down by turning to one of my roommates and demanded to know "Who IS this chick?" Dax introduced me.

This chapter of my life requires quite a bit of description ... and courage to relate. So I'll get back to this later.