CHAPTER 116: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE GRUNGY DAYS AND HIPPIE NIGHTS 1967-1968

 CHAPTER 116      GANG OF DREAMERS.    1967 - 1968

 

I didn’t consider myself a bad person. No, I was a good guy. When I was dating, the girls’ mothers all liked me. Some of the mothers liked me more that their daughters. I subscribed to the saying, “As long as you aren’t hurting anyone, it’s okay.” 

I thought other popular platitudes being muttered over and over on the college campuses were bad advice. I thought, “Don’t trust
anyone over 30,”  was plain stupid. Why denigrate something that in a short time would include yourself?  The most dangerous was, “If it feels good, do it.” Are you nuts, man? It might feel great to jump off a cliff and pretend you’re flying, right up to the splat, but I ain’t gonna do it just because the first part might feel good. That was why I didn’t do drugs. It might feel good when you did it, but look at the future pain. I wasn’t going to take any chances on scrambling my brain. If only I had applied the same resolve to other sins.

But wait, I was an Atheist now. I didn’t believe in sin. Good and bad was all relative and as long as you didn’t hurt anyone…well, you know.

I felt pretty clean anyway. I didn’t curse and cuss. I didn’t do drugs, as I’ve already mentioned a couple times. I didn’t steal or engage in what could be called illegal activities. I was even pretty obedient to traffic laws, except speeding. I didn’t even drink coffee yet and my intake of alcohol was minimal. I would have two Whiskey Sours when Lois and I dined out at the more upscale restaurants, but we hadn’t been doing much of that lately and even when we had money it was generally once a month. I didn’t chase women or cheat on my wife. I had never had physical sex with anyone else except for her. I was very pure from a worldly view of faithfulness; not so much in the Biblical sense. I think all those girlie magazines in my teen years counted against my sexual purity, and believe me, I wasn’t going to get purer in the days ahead. Most of the things on my “I don’t do that” list were about to shift to my “Do List”.  Some of it was the influence of my new gang of friends, but all of it was my own weaknesses.

Since my promotion to Accounts Receivable I had begun a nice sideline of ghosting  students’ college papers. These things could swing widely in subject matter. Some of my earlier work dealt with the film version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, an analysis of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia)’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the work of James Thurber and the issue of state aid to Catholic Parochial Schools. It was in providing such ghosting that I met Joe Rubio, who became my closest friend over almost the whole next decade, and from meeting Joe our gang of wannabe artists grew. (I collected some of  the work I ghosted, plus other early essays in Knowing my Essay from my Elbow. 

Well, images can be deceptive and the mind can play tricks with perception. Take a look at the illustration in the corner of the cover. The title runs from that to my wife’s elbow. 

But this may not be what you think it is.

Actually this particular image was snipped from a Best Buy ad many years ago and I don't think they are in the business of selling…well…that.

It may raise the question, though, if one does always know their elbow from that other part of their anatomy. If you flip the photo on its side or view the entire ad presentation, you will see it is indeed just another elbow.

Now what did you think it was and aren't you ashamed?

As if often the case with my covers, the seated lady with the cigarette is my wife.

 

In a way, I became a mentor to Joe. He was a few years younger and a
new employee in our department. He was a very likable person. He and his twin brother (in the photo to the right, Joe is the one with shorter hair) were the oldest in a family of nine children. They somehow managed to squeeze into a house on Upland Street in South Philadelphia. Having 11 people living in one of those small houses didn’t  leave much room for privacy. Joe and John shared a bedroom. Their sisters had even less individual space. 

The family was Cuban, they had emigrated to the United States just before Joe and John were born to escape for one reason or another the control of  Fulgencio Batista, who was in his first period of power. Often times Uncle Stan, Joe’s Catholic Priest uncle, would stop at the home for a beer and a game of pool. (Shown with Joe on the left.)

Joe and I were almost connected at the hip in those days. If I was somewhere, Joe was probably right there with me. He was then one of the first members of the group. Now Joe was not really all that interested in pursuing the artistic life like most of the group, but he did write some and like we others, he had his day job and he went to college at night. He went to St. Joseph University in Overbrook.

On the heels of Joe and probably  through him, I met Jim Tweedy. (Pictured right)
Jim became the usual host of our get togethers, where we would lounge about in his Carlisle Street home (Pictured)

basement and talk about how great we were going to be someday. Jim wrote, edited a school magazine in German and also wanted to go after a music career. If we weren’t grouping at Jim’s, then we would hang out in Rittenhouse  Square by the central fountain until the wee hours. Jim is pictured to the left.

Others in this inner group were Dot Waters, poet and writer; Maureen and Michael Alexander, actors, and then some who flitted in and out, such as Jeff Monson and Diane Pelligrino *writers, and Girard “Gerry” Neville, essayist and critic. 

There was another, who actually was an artist attending the University of the Arts, that became another close friend of mine. Her name was Jane Waiters and she proved a big help to me. I’ll come back to her.

In 2005 I put together a collection of stories, roughly tied together, about that decade. 

 Some of the stories were written close to the 1960s, others later, but they were based on my friends and events that happened from 1963 to 1974. The title I gave the collection was, “Keep All the Animals Warm”. It is a line from a Leonard Cohen song that I always associated with  the ’60. I thought his poems captured the essence of my stories.

This was the Canadian Leonard Cohen’s first album, 1967.

 There was a story I wrote that described our group. Here is the opening except from “Singing in the Street”.

They met in coffee shops or Hippie stores on Lombard and Sansom Streets. They would hang about Rittenhouse Square during late evenings. Sometimes, like tonight, they gathered in Jim’s walk-up room on Locust just off Camac. They talked about seeking their muse. Doreen and Douglas wanted to be actors, Tenley a poet and painter. Jim talked of forming a band with James called the James Brothers. He would write the music and James would write the words. James would just shrug. Only Diane and Rob had no interest in artistic careers. Diane wanted to be James’ wife. Rob was Frank's best friend just trying to avoid the Vietnam draft. Frank was not there.

Jim’s room was not large. There was one decoration, a fading poster saying Community Park – Peace and Love. There was a window. Against the back wall was an upright piano further shortening the space. There was a row of record albums and a stereo along a wall.

The furniture was battered and mismatched.

They sprawled in a loose circle around a chipped low-legged table of stained wood upon which sat an unmatched group of glasses, cups, and varied highs of choice.

From “Singing in the Street”, 1968 found in my collection, Keep All the Animals Warm, 2004.

 

That is very much what it was, but let me explain the differences
in this fictionalized version and reality.  What I remember is we went to Lombard and Samson Streets and this was the Hippie market, more than South Street. The streets were lined with shops selling used clothing, such as the Salvation Army Resale Shop, where we purchased most of our outfits There were candle and book stores, poster shops and occult stores. On one corner was a theater, The Pocket Playhouse. It was very colorful, the sidewalks and street gutters were painted a variety of colors. Music flowed from the shops. All this is gone today, gentrified out of existence. The photo is on South Street, there is nothing of the old days on Sansom or Lombard.  

Jim (James in my story) did not live in a walkup on Locust off  Camac Street,  but in his parent’s home on Carlisle Street.

An address of Camac and Locust
doesn’t exist, they are far apart. It was actually Maureen and Michael Alexander (Doreen and Douglas in the story) who had an apartment downtown, but I am not certain anymore if it was Locust or Walnut Street, but it was East of Broad Street. The  rest, except for the character’s names, is true.

Others of our group were Dot Waters, a poet,                                

  

       

Writers  Jeff Monson

 

 

           

Diane Pelligrino  

   

                                                       Girard Neville

and Thelma Ryan

Well, the comment about highs of  choice is not. There was only one choice for getting high, theconstant pitchers of Screwdrivers Jim kept mixing, and Joe  (Rob in the story) kept drinking until he fell asleep. (Right)

This was where I started to drink and smoke. The Screwdrivers were a constant and tasted pretty good. I started getting into this social drinking stuff. Everybody in the room smoked. There was a cloud always hanging in the air of Jim’s basement. I took up smoking as a defense, because when you were smoking you didn’t notice it so much around you. I began bumming from others in the group, but soon I bought my own. I didn’t stop there, though. I couldn’t just smoke what everyone else was. I started puffing Shermans.

 I couldn’t buy Sherman Cigarettes locally and had to order them shipped from New York. They were long and thin, 100 mms. In 1966 Benson & Hedges had set the cigarette market on its ear with the introduction of the Benson & Hedges 100s, but Sherman beat them to the punch. 

You could also get Sherman Cigarettes in different colors. I generally bought brown. They were cigarettes, but they looked like a long, thin cigar. I did also smoke cigars and I owned a couple pipes I sometimes fired up. I only smoked for one or two years, then one day I was working and realized I hadn’t taken a smoke break. I did so, lighting up and I asked myself, why am I spending money on these things if I can’t remember to smoke them? I stubbed out the butt and that was it. I quit cold turkey. I never felt a loss, no cravings, no withdrawal symptoms.

I kept to the drinking, did I ever. I also picked up another addiction, which we will get to soon.

 At some point in our relationship, Jim suggested we form a band.
He would compose the music and I would do the lyrics. We were going to call it “Ethereal”. Ethereal means something too light and delicate and perfect for this world. Our plan was for Lois to front the band as lead singer. Lois had a good voice. Even though she had been trained on the piano, she never played the instrument. Instead she went for the vocal instrument, her voice. She had sung in the various choruses in high school and with the choir at her church.

 She was also pretty and sexy, and willing enough for the rest of our plan. We would have her dress in flimsy, flowing outfits, translucent enough to keep the audience guessing if she wore anything beneath the flowing gowns or not. Of course the answer was, no she didn’t.

But our band, like a lot of other big ideas, never came to fruition.

Frankly, the group did more talking about their art than executing it, but we played the part well. 

Rittenhouse Square was full of suits in the daytime, the people in a hurry from here to nowhere, grabbing lunch on the run and hurrying back to their desks someplace. We were often part of that scene during the work week, but come evenings or weekends we shed the business attire for our bellbottoms and rag-tag wardrobe to loiter with the other “street” people in the Square.  

All evening it was a changing scene, like some giant kaleidoscope, ever changing its patterns. The Hippies came early in the night and they whirled about us, dancers in odd costumes. As the moon crossed the sky, it brought a harsher scene as those already too far gone on drugs began to drift about, sometimes begging for fix money. In the late hours, the wee hours, Homosexuals would begin to amble through. The bars were closing. Some had partners or came in packs, some came alone looking and longing for companionship. Finally, the crowds would seep away into the darkness of deep morning and then we would also drift off toward another day in our work clothes.

I say we would panhandle, but people resisted me, pushed me aside, resented my intrusion, my appearance, my health. I received more "gets" then I got money. "Get a job! Get a haircut! Get a bath! Get a life! Get ye to a military! Get away! Get! Get! Get!"

But who could resist Lady Train?

She was wintry-day pale: pasty-faced, faded-eyed, bloodless fingered. Wispy thin, all long-limbed and wavy like an apparition formed of early morning mist. She was a wraith. There was a hint of illness about her. She was not pretty. No one would suggest she was, but she exuded some beauty of spirit that touched the soul. People stopped for her, smiled at her and gave her handfuls of loose change. With this pittance we got along.

"Never mind," she told me. "Perhaps you'll sell a poem.”

"Poets never get rich," I said. "Painters sometimes get rich.”

“It’s not about money,” she said.

From “Poem Penyeach”, 1970.

In my collection,  Keep All the Animals Warm, (2005)

 

The character of “Lady Train” was based upon one of those

Hippie girls I met in Rittenhouse Square. She had a certain sadness about her and was obviously often strung out on drugs, but I found her appealing enough to make a character in my story.

I was beginning to pull away from this hanging about life. I was getting gigs.

 Part of this was due to Jane (pictured right). Jane Waiters was
actually an artist, a painter. We became friends and sometimes ate a meal together or just sat on a park bench and talked., She was very pretty with light brown skin. H ski was cool and smooth to the touch.

I used to ride the subway north with her on school nights. Temple was up on North Broad Street and she lived in North Philadelphia. Here is a passage from another one of my stories, “Why We Will Never have Peace”, that describes how it was to walk around Philadelphia with Jane in the 1960. (I am called Frank in the story.)

Frank took evening classes. The college closed Monday and Tuesday due to the snow, but on Wednesday he had to go. In better weather he walked to the campus. It took forty-five minutes to walk, but tonight he chose to ride because of the cold and ice. He heard his name called as he strode to the subway.

Jain came scurrying toward him, waving a hand of greeting. She was taking art courses at the University of the Arts. She carried a brown portfolio under her arm. She was a slim woman, about the same girth as Jeannette, but not as tall, a small woman actually. Her face was round, cheekbones smooth as finely polished wood, her skin the color of coffee with a tad bit of cream added. Her eyes were large, the brown irises islands completely surrounded by white seas, eyes burning with energy, intelligence and deep anger. You could see a flame behind the pupil, like the pilot light of a stove.

Her boyfriend was a photographer. He published photos in the underground press. It was Jain who  had talked Frank into writing for the same magazines. Her boyfriend was gone. She said he had gone to Cuba.

They rode the subway together. Frank because he was going to classes, Jain because she was going home and lived in an area where blue-eyed Frank would become a white island in a brown sea.

They came to a corner where a policeman was directing traffic, waving his arms like a frantic air raid warren guiding human targets to the nearest shelter. As they crossed the street he watched them, his eyes slits, eyebrows angry, and mouth clamped in a sneer. Jain stared straight ahead, but Frank turned his head and looked. The cop mouthed something Frank could not hear.

They stood on the subway platform corralled with a herd of rush hour commuters in overcoats and shining boots. The shove and tug of the homeward tide threatened to separate them. She hooked a hand around his elbow. Frank’s face shown pale under the hanging bulbs above, while Jain’s was a dark shadow under the same lighting. He watched the people watching them.

They stood in a crowded car, dangling from the dark brown ceiling straps and swaying in rhythm with the train. Moving north the number of white faces dissipated, leaving behind more and more brown faces, but the staring did not change with the color. When he looked at Jain, she was staring straight ahead at nothing, but her eyes burned.

“City Scenes or Why We Will Never Have Peace”, 2001

From my Collection, Keep All the Animals Warm, (2005)

The Jain in the story, of course, is Jane Waiters. Not much of a disguise there, and Frank is me. The Jeannette reference briefly was the stand in for Lois. Other than the names everything else in this passage is true. I did often hike up to Temple from work and when it was not so nice out I did ride the north bound subway with Jane.

Jane would get on me quite a bit about my continuing to work at Atlantic. “You should quit,” she’d say. “Go to New York, live on your talent.” I wasn’t brave enough to do it.

Jane disappear one day, I know not where, but I can guess. Her boyfriend, Carlton Matthews, had gone to Cuba, even though travel there was banned. She threatened to follow suit. She was angry at this country and so I think maybe she did go.

But before she disappeared, while I knew her, she took me to a small and messy office  somewhere downtown and introduced me around. This was the center for some Underground Press publications and very quickly I was writing for them. 

In “The Communicator” I had to use a pen name because I wasn’t allowed to write there. For the Underground, considering the frequently violent and incendiary material they published, especially in “Psychedelphia Period” for which I mostly wrote, I choose to use a pseudonym, thus I wrote as Eugene Lawrence.

Or the kids.

Kids Kids Kids

Everywhere you turned you had the goddamn kids all with ribs showing and with dirt across their cheeks which were sunk-in until their teeth showed in outline and their eyes were burning and seemed ready to tumble out and the sight made you toss at night in nightmares where you watched the naked children playing in the potholes in the streets     playing marbles and each one blind because the marbles they used were their fallen eyeballs round and glistening white with dark brown   black staring spots in the middle and little tags of dirt from the filthy road sticking there as they do to the underbellies of earthworms.

And if you didn’t dream of the kids you saw the women. WOMEN. Yes we had them back at the rear every blasted night until they moved us to the front where you only dreamed about the screwing and woke up in a sweat and you found nothing nearby but men   unshaved men stinking with the same sweat.

`“A Poem for the Boys on the Flat”,(1965)

 from Psychedelphia Period, 1968

Philadelphia, Pa.

Mitch Gilbert, editer

At any rate, as I was finding my muse I also heard the call of another another siren, S-E-X.

CHAPTER 115: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE GRUNGY DAYS AND HIPPIE NIGHTS 1967-1968

 

CHAPTER 115.     A COMPLETE  LOSS OF FAITH.    1967-1968

 At some point, after we moved into my father-in-law’s house on Cobbs Street, I got sick. I mean really sick sick.  It may have been the flu, but it was bad and I was miserable. I lay in bed sweating, unable to move. I don’t think I ever felt so ill before or since.

I wasn’t delirious. I was aware of every ache, every pain every moment of agony. It was so bad I would have welcomed delirium as a relief, but I couldn’t even go to sleep. I was certain I was dying. If I did go to sleep I wouldn’t wake up that I was sure of and I felt so bad such an outcome was perfectly fine with me. There was nothing I could do about any of this. I could only lie on my back in bed and stare at the walls. 

Evening had settled in. The only illumination came from a street
lamp through the slight crack down the sides of the window blinds. The room had become dark and suddenly there it was. It just magically appeared on the wall across from the foot of the bed where I couldn’t help but see it. It was a cross. It glowed white. It was well defined, very distinct and undeniable. There was a cross of light on my wall.

At that moment I felt my body cool, my fever break and by morning I would feel well as could be. I looked for the source of that image and there was nothing that could have caused it. The little illumination escaping in by the blind was not bright enough nor was there anything to make a cross shape. I had never seen such an apparition before and I never saw it again, and every night I looked for that cross.

 Now if we were scripting a movie here, our hero having miraculously recovered from death’s door under the mysterious presence of a cross would experience an epiphany of faith. Our movie hero would seek out the nearest minister or priest and go on on to live a pious life in service to God, helping the poor and invoking comparisons to Mother Teresa. (Yes, that is her on the left. You know she was young once. You seldom see anything but the old woman.)

I did not do the hallelujah thing. If that night was a knock on my soul’s door, I basically shrugged in off and went about my normal life. Maybe hitting me on the head with a solid oak cross would have gotten the message through, but more likely such a heavy blow would have finished me off. Still at this time Lois and I got the urge to join a church.

 Perhaps the losses we had suffered had something to do with our
sudden religious awakening, I don’t know. The big question for us was “where?” One certainty was we weren’t going back to our parent’s churches. Oh, no, no, no, when we married we were both eager to escape those places. This ruled out consideration of Bethel United Methodist, where we married, and Resurrection Lutheran, where her father was still treasurer. The photo to the right shows the early days of Resurrection when they met in the Llanerch Hills Community Hall while raising funds to build the church. Lois and her parents and others in her family are scattered throughout this scene. In fact, Lois is the tall girl toward left side holding a large white folder. Her father is to the far left.The church was eventually built, but that church building and Llarnerch Hills Community Hall have since disappeared from the landscape.

We began out soul searching in nearby mainstream churches,

which did include a large  Methodist congregation on the main line. That was probably our first stop. Walking into that church was like hacking our way through an iceberg considering the far from warm welcome we received. Not only did no one greet us as we passed through the narthex to the nave, there was definitely no usher or guide to a seat.

We went about halfway into the sanctuary and then slid to the middle portion of the middle section. I swear people avoided that pew as long as possible and when some did venture to sit there, they stayed a comfortable distance away from us, even though there was no virus dictated social distancing then. When we left, the minister did shake our hands, rapidly, with that pulling motion that moves one along and out. We got the distinct feeling that these people viewed us as interlopers who didn’t belong in their pristine chapel.

We found this to be the model for most of the churches we visited. When you talk about whitewashed sepulchers full of dead men’s bones you could have been talking about any of these churches. 

Of course sometimes it was our own bias that sent us packing never to return. For instance, we stopped at a small, but long standing church along West Chester Pike in Springfield. We sat in the parking lot and watched the arrivals walk in. I should say hobble in. I guess it was cruel, but the people entering this small worship house were fairly close to entering the mansions in the sky. It was a parade of walkers and canes and very gray heads, mostly ladies. It was not a long parade because this was a dying church where the parishioners had grown old along with the building and no youth had followed suit to save it. I don’t think we even went in. We simply backed out of the parking space and left.

Having exhausted the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and Episcopal churches in our purview, and wishing to avoid the Lutherans, Pentecostals and Fundamentalist denominations, we went on to a more outer ring. We went into Philadelphia proper and attended some services at the First Unitarian Church in Center City

 

It was a large building. I do not recall going to anything that resembled what one would normally call a service. There was no singing and no sermon. We met as this group of people not being called to God, but being called to the cause of the week. It might be the homeless this week, then a minority group seeking equality. Often it was a demonstration against the war. Mostly this consisted of coming together to protest in some way. Perhaps circle about city hall with signs and  chants or on one outing play a dead body in the middle of Rittenhouse Square; that being an anti-Vietnam activity. Most of our church activities were this, walking about and chanting how bad somebody was being. At least with the homeless, we did distributed some food and clothes.

 Becoming ever more radicalized, Lois and I became active with
the Social Action Council through that church. The first Sunday we walked into this institution we found ourselves not in a usual service, but in a rehearsal for a planned Vietnam protest in Rittenhouse Square. It was a die-in, where we participants would lay scattered about the park representing the dead killed in the war. Lois and I got very enthusiastic about the program to buy Black Action Bonds in

support of Black Capital. We viewed it as one of the best ways possible to aid the African-American community since we believed their plight was mostly economic. It was the programs idea that if we Whites and the church participated with this bond objective we would help the Black community to reach economic equality with society as a whole.

As far as I know that program faded into failure, but that
particular church is still actively leading social protest and holding fast to the philosophy of the late 1960s. More recently they have taken up the cause of Black Lives Matter. 

Involvement in these causes and some protest marches around city hall did get us shown on TV news.

After a few weeks of this we left that church and continued our search; after all, we weren’t looking for protests, we could get in many protest anywhere. We were seeking something higher than ourselves and so far the churches were letting us down  either by snubbing us or by involving us in social causes that had nothing directly to do with God.

Our final stop was the Ethical Society. 

We went to the Ethical Society, which was located on the backside of Rittenhouse Square. We sat in a balcony. I could have been attending my mother and dad’s church, except God was excluded from the proceedings. 

It opened with the prelude, a piece by Bach, I believe. Then someone stepped behind the podium and read a piece of text, but not a Biblical passage. Oh no, they read some paragraphs written by a well-known philosopher praising the mind of man. There was a classical musical selection. There was a sermon, but it did not speak of anything divine or touch too much on morals; instead it ranted on about the advances’ of technology and the genius of the human mind and how these would save mankind.

 I had a couple thoughts as we left. First of all, if you don’t
believe in God, why mimic a typical church service? Secondly, the attendees struck me as an egotistical bunch who considered themselves above the common man and thirdly, if they really thought the problems of the world were going to be solved by the evolving brilliance of human kind they were going to be greatly disillusioned. Frankly, I though the whole thing was silly. It would have made a good sketch for the future “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”.

 Needless to say, we never went back. 

Our formal search ended.

However, there was three blocks behind our home a Catholic Church called St. Bernadette Parish. It wasn’t huge as Catholic Churches go, but it had all the accouterments.  For some reason I began stopping there for the early morning Mass. I was walking back for this service every morning before heading to work. The rituals of the place began to grow on me. I did the Way of the Cross. I bought a Rosary and a book on Catholic beliefs. It had a title somewhat similar to, Father Smith Teaches Mister Jones, I can’t recall the exact title. 

 For the first time I had a feeling toward church. What I figured
out later was the rituals and trappings caught me up. In the Protestant Churches of my youth I was just sitting there on my own. At this Catholic Church I felt I belonged to something and was doing something, I was going to Mass daily, I was sitting with these beads and repeating prayers, I was lighting candles, I was really caught up by the “doing”, by all the busy work, not so much by God.

 Still, I got Lois interested as well and we decided to join the Catholic Church. I even had my Confirmation Name picked out, Francis. Why not? I had an Uncle Francis and my grandfather’s name was Francis; plus my nickname in high school was Frank, which is often the short name for Francis. I bought a miraculous medal depicting St. Francis of Assisi, who would be my patron saint.

Lois and I met with a Priest at the Parish. Eventually we arranged for the official steps to become Catholic and a date was set for us to meet at this priest’s office. I knew this was a big step that would infuriate both families. Neither my parents or her father were very receptive toward Roman Catholics, but we decided o go through with the conversion anyway. Heck, I was defiant enough to do something like this just to annoy them.

The priest stood us up.

We were in his office on time as instructed and we waited around a good hour, but he never showed and he never called or anything. We left. It was cold out and snowing, but I was steamed. I stomped my way back home through the laying snow. Okay, if that is how they’re going to treat us, then the Devil with them. We never went back, never spoke to the priest again and we gave up on Catholicism.

 In fact, we pretty much gave up on church.

 I had been reading a number of books on Spiritualism and
soothsayers. Jeanne Dixon (right) was a predictor of future events who became popular during the ‘60s. They wrote a book in 1965 called, A Gift of Prophecy that became a bestseller and she became a regular guest on TV talk shows. She also wrote a regular syndicated column for the newspapers.

I also became very interested in Edgar Cayce ( left), who was known as the “Sleeping Prophet” because he gave his prognostications while unconscious. He was considered to have the power to heal and many people flocked to him for that reason. Even with his death his influence went on. The Edgar Cayce Association for Research and Enlightenment continued.

 It was an easy step from the spiritualist to the occultist. I was
writing a lot about the “other world” and the supernatural. I read a lot of fantasy stories as well. Now I began reading Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible. I was getting deeper and deeper into the dark world and then…poof. I chucked that stuff aside, too. I had stopped believing in God, so how could I pretend to believe in the Devil.  I became an Atheist and an activist one at that. 

Now that I had no religion, because I didn’t consider Atheism to be a religion, although that is what it is, I needed a substitute. Well, after writing Couples, John Updike claimed that sex was the next religion.

I had found my new calling.

CHAPTER 114: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE GRUNGY DAYS AND HIPPIE NIGHTS 1967-1968

CHAPTER 114        PROTESTS AND MADNESS.  1967-1968

 

I’ve heard claims that if you remember the ’60, you weren’t there. Balderdash, I was there and I remember the so-called “Decade of Peace and Love”. I remember that the reality is there was very little peace and love existing during the period. The other myth is this calling it the ‘sixties in the first place. I guess you can’t call it a half-something. What is usually represented as the Love Decade began somewhere around 1964 and ran pretty much until 1974. It basically corresponded to the Vietnam War and there was no peace there and no peace here as the chants of the protesters grew ever louder.  (I guess it could have been called, “Decade of the Beatles”)

 And yes, Lois and I took part in various protests and marches over the period, probably on everything except Trident and I still can’t figure out if that fuss was about nuclear submarines or chewing gum? I do know Lois and I appeared on the TV during a protest of at Philadelphia City Hall, but am not certain what that protest was about. It was certainly in the “Long, Hot summer of 1967”, but there were many protests that summer. There were anti-Vietnam marches and civil rights gatherings, but maybe it was the Philadelphia School Walkout. 

Yes, I do remember the Love Decade. The problem I have is remembering exactly when what took place. I have done my best to pinpoint the moments of action, but it is possible that the following narrative will not always be in the proper sequence. Sorry about that, but you probably won’t notice or won’t care or both.

 Someone around he mid-60s credited the poet Allen Ginsberg

(right) for creating the term “Flower Power” on January 14, 1967. I would bet the term had been floating about before he uttered it. Some strung-out Hippie on the street probably blurted in out one day while watching his girl prance around the posies in her birthday  suit. But You can say some dude in the crowd said it, unless you’re

writing Forrest Gump, so you got to credit somebody well known. You throw some imaginative gobbledygook around your creative story, like it means no war and no violence, man, it means we aren’t out here protesting; we’re just engaged in peaceful affirmations. It may have been a four-year old trying out sounds. We’re lucky it didn’t end up as Fun Gun or something obscene.

 I wasn’t interested in who said it or when, or that it even existed. My concern was my wife’s situation. Going into mid-January we took her for admittance at the hospital. This was a step in trying to preserve her pregnancy and save this baby. On the 21^st she was doing okay and having no contractions. On the 23 they propped her feet up, but on the 25^th there was a bubble on the membrane. She didn’t feel well the next day and at 2:30 AM on January 27 she loss our fourth child. This time it was a girl, whom we named Sara.

Lois came home on the morning of January 30.

In mid-February she was driving herself crazy itching when she broke out in hives. The doctor gave her some medicine to relieve her. They felt it was a reaction to aspirin.

It had been a time of losses. We had lost our house and now our fourth baby. Our social life had dissolved as well. My conversational buddies had moved on and out of business and my life. Neither Dave Claypoole nor Ed were around to discuss issues with anymore.

All Lois and mine social acquaintances were also lost. To madness, I suppose, for our social world had revolved around Dottie and Jack Walls and their friends). Dottie was my long-time acquaintance from Glenloch and Downingtown, the slightly older girl who was my babysitter once upon a time. My parents were friends with her parents and after Dottie and Jack married we began spending evenings with them. I think Dottie contacted us first.

We seldom met as two couples for an evening. It was almost
always a party, usually including a sit-down dinner followed by drinks. She was a disastrous cook. Bakers use to hold  cake layers together with toothpicks The piece I was served contained 14 toothpicks in one slice of cake, but these soirées brought Florence and Gene Bare (right) and Susan Franks and others into our circle. When the Walls crumbled to pieces, the circle broke apart and these various people simply departed our life like wisps of smoke . Jack Walls has since died, but his life was in tatters anyway. Along with drugs, he was on the Sexual Predator list and served time in jail for child abuse. I believe some of their children grew up into troubled beings as well, but I have lost touch with that family. Her parents and my parents are gone and the remains of their family has dispelled into the winds of time.

On February 10, 1967, Dottie suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. It was  sad about Dottie. I don’t quite know what was wrong with her, but I remember my grandmother telling my mother when she was my babysitter, “There’s something not right with that girl.” She always seemed to be slightly spaced out and very unsure of herself. She was also boy crazy. On February 2, 1968 Dottie was committed to Embreeville State Hospital (left), what we called an insane asylum, or less kindly, The Bobby Hatch, and that’s the last I ever heard of her.

My own nervous breakdown at Atlantic had lost me my advancement and for a while I feared it would lose me my job. They thought enough of me not to let me go, but gave me a position as a Parcel Postage Clerk, which I believe  was a Level 4. They even allowed me to stay at the Level 6 grade I had taken and keep that pay and they promised they would put me in an actual Level 6 when one became available. After a few months, they put me back in my old Addressograph position.

And then in October 1966 someone from Personnel called me and asked if I would be interested in a job in Accounts Receivable as a Ledger Clerk. Indeed, I would. 

Once we survived the upset of losing the fourth baby, our world began to improve, at least for me it did. Lois had sunk into one of her depressions, hardly unexpected, but she was also becoming paranoid again, this time about her father. He was spying on us, she believed. He kept a loaded gun under his pillow. Her suspicions would grow. Otherwise, life was fairly mundane. 

I did not return to Temple in 1967, after dropping out in the first
half of 1965 due to  finances, I hadn’t been back. On April 29 Lois and I drove to Shillington, Pennsylvania to view the house and environment where John Updike had grown up and placed many of his first writings. I identified with Mr. Updike or I should say I identified with the world he wrote about in his younger years. He had grown up in Shillington and went to school in Reading. I grew up in Bucktown, a small village near Pottstown. As a teen I spend a lot of nights driving up 422 to Reading, sometimes to play miniature golf or bowl, sometimes just to race other cars on the highway. I was beginning to mimic his writing in my own.

The water was cold. She felt pain in her gums drinking it and the ice cubes bumping her upper-lip was annoying. She set the glass on the nightstand, dipped two fingers and dabbed the chilly drops on her forehead. They slid down the sides of her nose into her eyes. She blinked.

 She inched across the width of the bed and by stretching both body and one arm was able to raise the window shade. The sky was now a framed picture in the wall. She held the pull loop tightly, squeezing until the slicing pain in her side eased and then she let it go and  fell back against her pillow.

She was exhausted.

Her pillow was hot. Her short hair twisted and prickled her neck. The room was like an oven. She wished the window were open or even the door.

Yellow light shown through the crack at the bottom of the closed door and voices seeped through from the room beyond. The muffled voices made it impossible to understand the words. The tone was discernible and by it she could tell the speaker. Her husband’s voice was controlled, but weary with a touch of anger. 

She wished their neighbors would go. They came out of kindness inquiring to her feelings, but they refused to leave and she found that cruel. They had paid their social debt why didn’t that satisfy them?

There was a change in tone. Her husband had stopped talking. Maggie Braum took up the conversation. She was shrill and high-pitched. Maggie was probably rehashing the facts, making certain she had the story from beginning to end, memorizing her talking points for tomorrow’s round of koffee-klatches. What would Maggie tell?

Tell them about Dr. Lewis, please, she thought. She dragged the sheet halfway over her face. Just tell them about him.

She recognized her name being spoken by her husband, but couldn’t make out anything else. The voices were moving away. Did that mean they are leaving? The sounds dwindled across the living room toward the front door. She listened focusing all her attention on the sound. Her husband stopped speaking. There was a long silence. She listened, biting the sheet. The silence scared her. She would scream if it continued.

Then there was a hollow booming voice. This was George Braum. The conversation went on. Why wouldn’t they leave?

Pain jolted her diaphragm. She smelled blood again for a moment. It clung to her, that dreadful odor and the stain would not wash out. She had attempted to clean herself, but was weak and couldn’t scrub hard enough. The scent was filling the room. She whimpered. Her stomach rolled and she swallowed.

She turned to the window. The sky was black velvet studded with red and sparkling white stars, like an ad she’d seen in a woman’s magazine for diamond jewelry. How the stars blazed, out of her reach, as had the diamonds in the advertisement. It didn’t matter. She had never wanted bright shining playthings. She wanted other things more substantive than glimmer and trim, something beyond even the beautiful star-filled night.

Excerpt from “A  Beautiful Star-filled Night” (1964)

From my Collection: Daily Rhapsody. (1971)

   

 

Updyke and I came from the same general area. He was only 9 years older than I. What he wrote of I was familiar with, the area, the people, the lives of his characters. My own writing was drifting over in imitation of him, but I was a chameleon as a writer. I had written over the years like Evan Hunter, Charles Beaumont, H. P. Lovecraft, Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway; why not John Updike as well.

Probably I felt a good deal of envy for John. After all he came from my territory, but here he was in his mid-twenties as what could be called a successful writer. If nothing else, he was a self-sustaining writer, making his living by his words without some day job stealing his time. He was a staff writer for “The New Yorker” for gracious sake by the time he was in his early twenties and his stories and poems were selling to top paying publications. He also went to art school, because he wanted to be a cartoonist, just like me! I guess he was living my life!

I turned away from Updike, though, when Couples came out. I

had loved Rabbit, Run and The Centaur, and I know Couples got great reviews from the elite critics, but I didn’t like it. For one I couldn’t take the sex seriously. People were saying really ridiculous things to each other that were supposed to be provocative and naughty. I found them silly.  Nobody talked like these people during sex. 

Secondly, I secretly suspected he sold out. He was a working, regularly published, well-received writer, but in a sense not a star. Did people get excited by The Poorhouse Fair, by the stories in Pigeon Feathers or The Same Door? Couples seemed to me a way to get attention by flaunting sex like a flag in the face of America. It worked, Updike made the cover of time and the best seller lists and onward and upward.

But I lost my identification with him and I found Couples a boring read. 

 

I think about then I got very engrossed in another John; John Steinbeck. Maybe those people on Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat fit more with the Hippie scene. Actually the first book of Steinbeck’s I read was To a God Unknown and I really liked it. This Dell paperback issue of the novel makes it look more lurid than it was. This looks more like something from the Erskine Caldwell collection. Steinbeck did win the Nobel Prize, something Updike never achieved…or am I just being mean now? Sure as little green onions, I ain’t ever going to win the Nobel Prize.

Put all that aside, my duel life was emerging into blossom.