CHAPTER 123 GOVERNMENT ABUSE AND THE HELL OF COURT 1969
I lost the key to our apartment mailbox. Maybe I should have left it alone and allowed the mail inside rot. I generally didn’t get anything of value. I had noticed that as of late most of my letters had been pre-opened. I did not think this was being done as a convenience to me.
My best guess was the FBI was reading my mail.
the times I was living in. There was a good bit of distrust, suspicion and fear, not dissimilar to today. I had been writing for the Underground Press in publications that were not so subtle about their stance against authority and the status quo. In Philadelphia there was also a war against the police being ginned up and the Philly cops of that ear didn’t help cool things down. They swaggered about the city in these leather jackets and they had very descriptive words for any protesters on the street.
I was not much a fan of the establishment myself then either. There were also the magazines I had subscribed to. One was well known as a radical, leftist rag that also often printed salacious pieces. This was a very popular magazine with artists and anyone considering themselves a revolutionary. It was called Evergreen Review” It did feature work by a who’s who of writers though, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Samuel Beckett, Charles Bukowski and many others of note. Frankly, I tried to get printed in the blasted thing myself.
of Phoebe Zeit-Geist”. Zeit-Geist in English meant the temper of the times: the general outlook in spirit and attitude. The strip was part satirical, part intellectual , part criticism of the era, and a whole lot of sexual imaging. Somehow poor Phoebe often found herself naked and tied up.
They had also translated and run the French comic strip of Barbarella, later made into a somewhat notorious film starring Jane Fonda. Like Phoebe Zeit-Geist, Barbarella couldn’t seem to keep herself completely dressed either.
Through Evergreen I started to get books under the Black Cat imprimatur from the same publisher, Grove Press. Grove specialized in the forbidden, censored literature and often found itself defending against obscenity charges. It was the Publisher that brought the banned
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence to America and knocked down a lot of the censorship walls. The published a lot of the Beat Writers and books on then taboo subjects, such as homosexuality and bondage. All these books and magazines meant I was opening myself up for more erotica and radical ideas.
“Avant Garde”. I am not certain where I ran across information on it, but I was one of the premier subscribers and I continued to be one until it closed shop in July 1971. It was very critical of both the American government and our society in general. It was very slickly done and it featured a lot of sexual imagery in its art work.
My other subscription was to a magazine that many men subscribed to. This was “Playboy”. It was a Christmas gift from my wife. You will see when it came to sex she was quite liberal.
Lois and I had also taken part in a few protests and demonstration about town, and would continue to do so for a while to come. We were becoming regular attendees in the coffeehouse as well. The result of this “radical” behavior was apparently seen by someone as a threat.
I came home one day from work and there was a large and strange looking document sticking out of my mailbox, and duplicate ones poking out of several other mailboxes on the wall, actually most of a majority. What the heck was this. I opened it up and it was a subpoena. What in the world was this all about?
I first registered to vote in 1961 when I turned 21. That was the first year I was eligible, since the 18 year-olds being allowed to vote didn’t happen for another decade during the Vietnam War. Having grown up in Republican strongholds, I had registered as a Republican. I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, my first Presidential election. By 1968, I was already becoming a rebel and I voted for Dick Gregory for President, although still registered Republican.
When we moved to University City in Philadelphia we moved into a heavily Democratic area. We had to re-register because our address had changed, so one day a month or so after we settled in, Lois and I ambled down to the registration office, which was located in a University of Pennsylvania Medical Clinic on the corner of our block right across from Clark Park. There was a fairly large room with a couple long tables in the center, a few chairs and almost no people about. Some guy took Lois to one table and this middle-aged woman called me over to the other table. She checked my ID and asked some questions. Had I been a resident of the address at least 30 days? Birth date? Was I an American citizen? They were very basic queries. Of course, one she asked was occupation. Lois told her guy she was a private secretary at the University of Pennsylvania Chemical Department. I told my interrogator I was a “freelance writer”, because at that moment that was all I was.
“Freelance writer” is a pretty nebulous title. What is it, anyway? It could simply be a prideful substitute for “unemployed”. Here I am around 50 years later and I still call myself a “Freelance Writer”, but almost the only writing I do anymore is my Blogs, but writing really is the only thing I do. Anyway, Lois did not get a summons like I did. I thought that was curious, but I quickly figured out it was the occupation answer. She was a Private Secretary, that was a “real” job. I was some mysterious thing called “freelance writer”. They must have taken that answer as phony in some way.
I was also curious about the witness. The address was only a few blocks away, so I walked over to the street and the house number. There was no house. There was a weedy empty lot. And my occupation of freelance writer was considered suspicious?
I soon learned through the student grapevine that I should call the Democratic Headquarters for my district. There had been several thousand residents of the area mostly college students, that received subpoenas challenging their right to vote. The Democrats were supplying a lawyer. I spoke with someone from the Party. He told me I would have to go to court or my vote would be automatically stripped from me.
Thus on Thursday, July 17, a day when the temperature would reach 96 degrees, I found myself entering a court room in Philadelphia City Hall. I was ordered to report early and with me that was okay. I am usually early before my appointed times, which on this day I was glad to be because I got a seat about halfway down the room.
The space filled quickly, soon it was wall to wall people. They brought in more chairs, but this was limited by the fire laws. People were standing across the back, shoulder to shoulder. There were many more jamming the hallway who couldn’t even get an eyelash through the door. Up at the front was a long table, or bench as they called it, with six men seated behind it. These were our judges, but they really weren’t judges. They were Republican Committeemen and Ward Healers. Our fate would be decided by the very people who brought us up on charges.
I looked around the court room. It was clear most of those summoned were college students, but not all. Some, like me, must have fallen in their net by error. There were three or four middle aged Black women a couple rows down from me. They each wore one of those Sunday-Go-To-Meeting hats. A few rows behind was an old man. Over from me sat a fat guy with a long white beard. “Oh my gosh”, I thought, “they even subpoenaed Santa Claus.” Our Democratic Lawyer sat in a chair at the front.
side wall. There were three men and a lady. Their age was indeterminable, but they were all shabby and slovenly. I guessed they were paid off by something like a bottle of Old Thunderbird for their testimony, which they gave with the hesitancy of poor memorization. I wondered which one lived in the vacant lot. The witnesses name was male, so I could only rule out the woman.
Every time our lawyer stood to make a motion or an objection he was overruled. At one point he was even told to shut up. Finally, the “judges” began calling forth the accused, one at a time, alphabetically. I stole a look at my watch (I wore one in those days) and calculated it would be hours before they got to the M’s and maybe days before this ended.
Every one called forward so far was able to produce a valid Pennsylvania License and allowed to leave. About mid-morning a brief recess was called, probably so these “judges” could go potty. Our lawyer stepped to the center of the front and announced that anyone with a valid Driver’s License with the same address as their voter registration could show it to the clerk and go home. They would not lose their voting privileges. A long line formed, including yours truly, and after several minutes I was back on the boiling streets headed home.
It was all a sham, an attempt to disenfranchise the University City population. A calculation had been made that most of these students would have licenses from their home, not with their college addresses, but the plotters guessed wrong in this case. They certainly miscalculated on mine. Pennsylvania regulations said you had to be a resident of the district you registered within for 30 days. Lois and I had waited out the 30 days.
Something was happening with me. I was walking along Market Street, then began to cross 15th at the light. There were three girls ahead of me, all young, probably on work break. As they started across at the light change a group of young men came from the other direction. Suddenly, one of these fellows reached out and grabbed one of the girl’s breasts. She looked totally flabbergasted at this breach of civility. The guys simply kept walking, bent over with laughter. I felt both a sense of outrage, but also a feeling of arousal.
I had become aware that I was scoping out the miniskirts flitting
about town. There was always a group ensconced near the North American Building, especially around lunchtime. My eye was always wandering over that way on the change the wind might blow.
One day I was walking about the streets near our apartment, wandering down to the college campus and the little stores about that catered to the students. A VW Beetle passed me, going in the same direction. The VW pulled into a parking space on the opposite side and this young woman, obviously a student, who was wearing a very flouncy mini dress parked her car.. Just as I came opposite her car, she leaned in over the driver’s seat to scoop up her books from the other side. The force of her stretch to reach brought her dress up her back and hips and I could plainly see she wore no underwear. To be honest, it kind of made my day.
I was turning into a bon vivant voyeur.
In the middle of July, Lois and I got a respite from the tensions of new jobs, a new home and a kangaroo court trial. Her long time best friend, Evelyn had an older brother who owned a marina in Rockhall, Maryland and we were all invited down for a day and a cook out. We, Lois and I, were driving not too far outside of Rockhall when Lois said she didn’t have a swimsuit. Just outside of town was a small gift shop along the road that sold bathing suits. We pulled in and she bought herself a nice white Bikini.
We arrived and were greeting by Evelyn, who was dressed in a white Bikini of her own. Lois went into a changing room and put on her suit, and then we toured the docks and went on a cruise down the Chesapeake Bay to the sea.
When we got back we all dove into the Marina’s swimming pool to cool off from the blazing sun, which is when we discovered Lois’ new suit went transparent when wet.
So we discovered a couple of things. I was aroused by the voyeur aspects of this and she was not particularly embarrassed; actually, she seemed fine with the situation and now we knew she had some exhibitionist tendencies.
Lois is bipolar, although we did not realize it back in 1969. We knew she suffered with long bouts of deep depression and we had also seen some examples of paranoia, such as when she was so fearful that the little kids next door were plotting to destroy our
car, but we were in the dark about the manic phases. One problem for those with depressive or Type 2 Bipolar is the depressions are easily experienced, but not the mania. Suffers often feel the manic times are normal, partly because they generally feel good when having them. Being up, even if a little crazy, is a lot better than being down in the dark of depression.
During a manic episode the person may engage in risky sexual behavior, which might partially explain her affair with the orderly. It is quite common in mania to have a significantly heightened sex drive. A bipolar person can become much more focused on sex and risky behavior than they normally would.
We did not know about this possibility that she was bipolar and prone to manic attacks. I simply thought I was lucky to have a pretty wife who would do all kinds of sexual things some wives wouldn’t, besides her lean toward exhibitionism fit perfect with my voyeuristic tendencies.
Now explaining my sexual peculiarities is a different manner. Maybe I was just insane.
I think I only had three pairs of pants, not counting the suit I wore to work. I had a pair of blue soft cotton bell-bottom jeans, probably my most comfortable and favorite wear. I often wore a pair of suede bell-bottoms with a slight low-rider waist when we went to the concerts or coffee houses . Finally, I had a white pair of dress pants
.
These instances would also lead to a change in Lois and my relationship. Riskier sex was peeking over the horizon.
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