by William Poe
Wagner’s famous opera Das Rheingold isn’t the best choice for an evening’s entertainment if someone has a broken heart. When the Rhine maidens tell Alberich that, if he forswears love, he can rule the world through the gods’ all-powerful ring, it sounds like a fair trade. The demise of my relationship with Tony convinced me that gay love couldn’t last. My relationship with Virginia had gone nowhere. Love was for others, not for me.
During what remained of senior year, I skipped art class and created no more paintings. When I passed Darsey in the hallways, he would try to cajole me into talking. Each time, I worked into the conversation that I was seventeen, and once quoted two words from the contract of every public school teacher—“moral turpitude.” He got the message and left me alone.
It seemed as though everyone was happy about graduating but me. The Hawks had not taken my advice to “let others win.” They went on to take the state championship. Major universities recruited several team members; others accepted scholarships from state colleges. Heath, the quarterback, proposed to Lois Ann, who had ultimately outplayed Melinda in their competition for him. Heath and Lois Ann planned to have a big church wedding before he went to Vietnam. Heath was the only student I knew who turned down an academic deferment in order to enlist.
It was slowly beginning to sink in that we would all be going our separate ways after nearly twelve years together. Quite a few people wondered what I planned to do after graduation. They told me how they’d miss my columns, which, they confessed, had influenced their attitudes over the years.
During most of twelfth grade, I had been under Darsey’s spell, hanging out with him, his adult friends, and the few students whom Darsey had coaxed out of the closet. Now I rejected Darsey and his gay crowd.
Quite a few longtime friends had dropped out of school. It was an age of distinctions between those following a relatively conservative path to college and professional careers, and those seeking alternative lifestyles. The latter category described classmates who I referred to as my “hippie friends.” They weren’t interested in my love life and didn’t find it strange that I chose to be unattached. Feeling so forlorn and love lost, I found that the dropouts’ lives made more sense than the lives of friends eager to become doctors or lawyers.
I turned in my last editorial for the Hawkwind Journal with the title “In Praise of Dropouts.” It began this way:
Why would anyone choose to graduate from Sibley High? How many will be married for a few years and then divorce? Statistics show that 40 percent of marriages are doomed after the first five years. The odds that anyone from Arkansas will rise above a minimum-wage job by holding a diploma are no greater than those who get a GED.
We should have learned a trade and prepared for life as a carpenter or electrician. The days of our youth cannot be reclaimed, no matter how much we regret their loss in the confines of public education.
I worked on the final edition’s layout and managed to hide my column on a page of ads for car washes, automobile repair shops, and various other low-wage employers. I thought no one would see it there. I was in for a surprise.
Jake Jensen was someone I had known since grade school. We had been close friends then, but grew apart after junior high school. Jake was there the day that Jay manipulated Ernie into punching me—the day that Jay fried a toad on a manhole cover and blew up a robin’s nest with firecrackers. Jake had almost challenged him, but backed off because, like all of us, he feared Jay’s wrath. Jake’s mother, whom we called Dot, but whose real name was Dorothy, descended from one of Sibley’s first families. Her grandfather had been president of the mining company that dug the bauxite pits. When the ore ran out, the company switched to mining granite, almost devouring a nearby mountain by the time I was an adult. Everyone knew that Dot had been a beatnik during her college days, and many viewed her as a bad influence.
Lenny had his own reasons for not liking the Jensen family. Dot and her husband had been on the other side of the integration debate, marching arm in arm with black protesters, while Lenny led angry alumni on the steps of Little Rock High School in 1957.
When I first visited the Jensen house, I had been impressed with Dot’s extensive library, which had shelves of books about art, religion, and philosophy. Growing up, I spent many evenings sitting with Dot, going through them. From her, I learned more about the abstract expressionists who had so impressed me as a young boy. Dot considered me her “artist friend” who, she told people, had a great future as a painter. Dot owned two of my works, each completed before I was fifteen. Jake once told me that his friends thought the paintings were “trippy” and that they liked to stare at them when they got high.
Dot preferred that Jake stay at home if he wanted to experiment with drugs, and she extended the preference to his friends. She had once smoked pot herself and later took up the study of existential philosophy, all resulting in a progressive attitude. Such liberalness came with risk. On weekends, the local sheriff staked out the Jensen house in hopes of arresting Dot and jailing the miscreant youths holed up there. The sheriff was one of Lenny’s friends who had joined him in ’57. Old grudges die hard in the rural South.
Even as a boy, Jake had an impressive physique with broad shoulders and strong biceps. During senior year, he let his hair grow out, which set his unruly blond curls cascading around his face in the manner of a Greek kouros. I had always had a crush on Jake but knew he was not gay, and reminded myself of that when my thoughts drifted toward fantasy.
One afternoon, Jake slipped a note into my locker saying to meet him in the cafeteria at lunch. I took a seat at one of the uncomfortable lunchroom tables and forced down a bite of soy burger. I’d fallen into a funk, recalling recent events, when Jake dropped his hand in front of my eyes to get my attention.
“Aren’t you worried about meeting in a public place?” I said. “What will people think?”
“I don’t see any people around here,” Jake said, contradicting the fact that the room was nearly full. “Just a bunch of minds conforming to the straight and narrow.”
“Depends on what you mean by straight,” I said, chuckling self-consciously.
Jake looked puzzled. “You are so weird,” he said. “Dot laughs after she says things, too, sometimes. You’re both weird.”
“She has a beatnik sense of humor. I can relate.”
“Beatnik? Naw, she was more like that girl in Dobie Gillis—what was her name? Zelda or something.” Jake smelled of pot. His eyes were as red as the pickled beets on my lunch plate. He continued, “Mom says she met Jack Kerouac once, or was it Neal Cassady? Anyway, she met someone like that on the way to San Francisco.”
Jake sat down and dove into his food, taking a huge bite out of a soy burger and washing it down with a swig from a half-pint milk carton.
“Simon, buddy,” Jake said, wiping a trail of milk from his wispy beard, “remember that article you wrote about the milk strike, after the principal yelled at us for not putting our cartons in the trash?”
“Hadn’t thought about it recently,” I said. That was yet another time I challenged the boundaries of what I was supposed to cover in my column.
“What are they going to do next year without someone like you writing about stuff like that? Bunch of dicks, anyway.” Jake waved his hand toward a table that looked like a gathering of National Honor Society members. “Fuck ’em, man.”
“So, Jake, you will be graduating, right? The last time we really spoke was when Dot paid me to tutor you in math. That was, what, ninth grade?”
“Rub it in, smart-ass. Yeah, ninth grade. That’s around the time you got weird—well, weirder’n usual—and just stopped coming over to the house.”
“I stopped going anywhere.”
“Got weirder.”
“Darn it, Jake, I’m not weird.”
Jake laid down his fork and fixed his gaze on me. “Back then, you had a stick so far up your ass it came out your mouth. Like none of us was good enough to hang out with y
ou. Mr. Do-Right or something.”
I was beginning to feel rotten. Had I really been so isolated from everyone? Didn’t they know that I had been afraid—that I thought they knew more than me, especially when it came to things like sports and just getting along?
“Don’t get mopey on me, man,” Jake said, knuckling my forehead. “Wasn’t sure the old Simon was still in there, not until I read that column. You were such a weirdo in grade school. We all liked you, though. Well, not Heath and those guys so much.”
“You’ve never mentioned reading my column before.” I wanted desperately for Jake to get on with whatever he had to say.
“The guys at work asked me to bring a few copies of the paper when I come in for my shift.”
“You’re probably the only employee at the place who’s going to graduate.”
“Just about,” Jake admitted. “I work the evening shift and weekends so I can go to classes during the day. I’ll have some money coming when I graduate, but I’m trying to save up as much as I can on my own. Getting a diploma doesn’t matter much to me, but Dot would blow up if I didn’t finish school. I’ll graduate as long as I don’t flunk biology.”
Jake wolfed down the last of his food. “Listen, man, some people are coming over this Friday. You should hang out with us. It’ll be cool.”
“But, Jake, I don’t get high,” I reminded him.
“You’ll be the honorary straight guy. Anyway, you’re weird enough without drugs. Just tell them you’re the one who did those paintings on the wall. Man, people trip on those. They’re weird.”
“Weird again!”
“Ah, you know what I mean.”
I guessed I did.
Friday night, I parked on the street in front of the Jensen house—a small bungalow set back from the road. Several of the cars I spotted were among those that cruised through the Burger Chef parking lot. A few were recognizable for other reasons, such as a Cadillac with plastic dice hanging by a string from the rearview mirror and an Oldsmobile with tassels strung across the back window. Those cars belonged to Sibley’s resident drug dealers, dropouts I was not thinking about when I wrote my column. When they were students, they hung out at the vending machines near the lunchroom and sold cigarettes.
Before heading to Jake’s, I had been reading one of Ouspensky’s books about Gurdjieff. To paraphrase the man’s ideas, mediocrity was death. To live, one must take risks and go to extremes. Walking toward Jake’s house, I felt the same kind of adrenaline rush as when I had driven to the cliff overlooking the Arkansas River.
I knew my way around the Jensen property and decided to enter quietly through the back, so I made my way to the rear gate. A couple necked in the doorway that led to the family room where I had tutored Jake. Dot’s library was down the hall. Before anyone recognized me, I went to the library but found the door locked. Clearly, Dot wasn’t taking any chances with her books.
Jake and his friends were in the front room dancing like whirling dervishes to the sounds of a Spooky Tooth album. I felt out of place wearing clothes that reflected Darsey’s influence. But at least my hair was an appropriate length. Most of us had been letting our hair grow out in the mod style of the day. Before long, people began to recognize me and waved hello, but the tracers in the air created by their hand movements distracted them. They were obviously high on LSD.
I overheard someone say, “Don’t worry, he’s cool,” assuring those who didn’t know me that I wasn’t a snitch sent in by the sheriff. Someone indicated a painting on the wall and then pointed at me, followed by nods and a return to the ecstatic dancing.
Jake was so stoned I couldn’t get a coherent word out of him. Dot was nowhere to be found. I started toward her bedroom to knock on the door, but someone stopped me and said, “Never ’sposed to go there, man. Gotta leave Dot to herself.” The fellow was so stoned his eyes bulged as large as Ping-Pong balls.
I couldn’t help thinking that this crowd wasn’t any freakier than the drunks who had attended Darsey’s party. Were these people any less desperate to escape society’s expectations? Any less determined to find love? The difference seemed to be that Jake’s friends inhabited their bodies. They didn’t float above themselves the way Darsey’s group did with their baroque mannerisms.
It wasn’t until nearly everyone had left, or collapsed onto couches and chairs, that Dot came out of her room. She was overjoyed to see me and insisted that I come back on Sunday, when things would be quiet, and we could catch up.
I spent Saturday painting a swirling abstract, remembering how Jake’s friends looked as they danced under the black lights, which gave their skin an eerie glow and provided a 3-D effect to the colors of their tie-dyed shirts.
Sunday, around noon, I went to see Dot, but she wasn’t at home. Jake, having just gotten off work, was in a stupor, still not having slept since the partying began on Friday night. He sat with me at a punched-iron table in the garden. Just then, Dot’s Chrysler station wagon careened up the driveway. Notoriously nearsighted, she barely managed to get the tank-sized vehicle through the gate without scraping the sides. Then she slid to a stop on the gravel and hung her arm out the window, shaking a package in my direction.
“I was afraid I’d get here too late,” Dot said, opening the car door and ambling toward the table. Dot was prone to mood swings. At that moment, she was on an uptick. Her face glowed with conspiratorial light as she revealed the contents of the package.
“Now, Jake, your minions need not know about this,” she said. Then, in a quiet voice directed toward me, “Take this. It’s a key to the library. You go there anytime you want and—well, anytime you want—paint me another picture. I bought an easel for you yesterday.”
“You want me to do your portrait, don’t you?”
“Simon—would you? I know you’ll be famous someday, but oh well, honey, shit, even if you’re not, who cares about fame?” Dot’s ambivalence toward materialism had her tongue-tied.
“Dot, it’s okay. I’ll do your portrait, à la Modigliani—Dot with Dotted Eye.”
Her eyes glistened with tears at the thought of a Modigliani-style painting of herself. “Dot with Dotted Eye! Oh, Simon, its genius—sheer genius. I have got to get a drink. This is too marvelous.”
Dot rushed into the house, but not without repeating, “I mean it, Jake, don’t let those vagabonds know that Simon has a key.”
Jake paid no attention. He turned his head sideways and puffed on the remains of a joint he’d put on his roach clip. Dot ignored the fragrant cloud of herbal smoke blown in her direction.
By the next Friday’s gathering, I had put together a more appropriate wardrobe, trading in my slacks and tailored shirt for bell-bottom jeans embroidered with butterflies and daffodils, along with a blue work shirt emblazoned on the back with a silhouette of the Zig-Zag man.
Gossip flew around Sibley when someone spotted me at the Burger Chef in the backseat of the most notorious drug dealer’s Oldsmobile. People assumed I had started using drugs, having fallen in with the “wrong crowd.” Darsey heard the talk and thought he’d found an opening to become part of my life again, if only to guide me back to the “family.” He confronted me in the hallway one afternoon, but I gave him an evil-eyed glare and he scampered away.
Not that I wasn’t tempted to try drugs. Watching people at Jake’s after they dropped acid and noting the gradual change from relatively coherent, if dull, people to wide-eyed visionaries made me curious about what they were experiencing. I bought a copy of Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan and read it in the privacy of Dot’s library. The Indian sorcerer used peyote as a gateway to spiritual realms. I began to hear people talk about Timothy Leary and his ideas regarding levels of reality. I had already studied enough Gurdjieff, Swedenborg, and others to know that challenging one’s notions of reality was important to spiritual advancement.
There seemed to be three ways hallucinogens might affect a person. Those who had no spiritual bearings, no purpose in the
ir lives to start with, tended to lose control and were apt to perform dangerous stunts or simply “freak out.” If a person already subscribed to a spiritual system, as did Castaneda’s Don Juan, they generally gained insights that confirmed and expanded their beliefs. For someone filled with purpose and drive, hallucinogenic experiences enhanced their creativeness. I thought about how the music of some rock bands had changed dramatically for the better after experimenting with acid. The Moody Blues had been a run-of-the-mill rock band until they encountered Timothy Leary and created a whole new form of rock that incorporated orchestral textures. And everyone knew how acid had transformed the music of the Beatles. If hallucinogens enhanced my art, and at the same time led me to a deeper understanding of the cosmos, why not try some?
Early on graduation day, I went to Jake’s house. He had passed the biology final, but decided to get his diploma through the mail instead of attending the ceremony.
“Anyway, it’s such a bourgeois thing to do,” Dot said when Jake announced he wasn’t going. Still, I detected a note of disappointment in her voice. A part of Dot longed to be a traditional mom.
Jake dropped some acid nicknamed purple microdot. It didn’t take long for him to become monomaniacal, examining the rim of a lampshade for a good ten minutes. Next, he ran his finger along the oak grain of a wall panel. I was sure I could channel my energies better than he was doing. He didn’t know Isis Unveiled, had not read Swedenborg or Gurdjieff, and wasn’t aware of the Teachings of Don Juan. I was sure that being an artist in control of his medium had prepared my imagination.
Just before getting my diploma, I planned to leave this world for unexplored territory, embarking on my first acid trip. I thought I knew what to expect after watching Jake and his friends dropping tabs of orange sunshine and purple haze or touching cellophane squares of windowpane acid to their tongues. Arkansas had its own brand called Rainbow Acid, a name descriptive of the strong visual effects it was supposed to induce. I decided that was the one for me.