1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  Besides those practical considerations, Betty was engaged to a goof and was willing to marry him despite his deficiencies of soul, humor and spirit. Why? Because he profiled “correct” in her parents’ view of the world. Because he aspired to a few more years of grad school and then a few decades on a campus, where he would teach something soft. Betty would be happy on a campus, thinking, sharing her thoughts with others, reading books and continuing to develop new thoughts.

  Besides all that, I was short on words in those days. I didn’t need as many words in those days, and in this case my verbal efficiency went to 100%; I said nothing.

  Besides that, I kept two sets of books on the personal value issue. In one set, I was broke. In the other set I had a whole world in front of me with its exotic potential, foreign shores and years of adventures. This seemed painfully obvious to our friends and to me. I loved Betty, loved her sparkling eyes, her infrequent but incisive wit, her generosity in what counts most to a young man and every square centimeter of her perfect physical self. I feared my own arrogance, casually dismissing such beauty, but I frankly anticipated a juicy population of incredible women in the coming years. Besides that, Betty Boop would be back from Boston in a week and wouldn’t leave again to be married until June. Plenty of time.

  Call me egregiously practical, but everyone tacitly agreed that it was for the best, that Betty was not a good candidate for spaghetti and acid. Too flighty, skittish, vulnerable and inexperienced, unlike us seasoned veterans, she was far better off discussing things in Boston. I tried to put her out of my mind.

  At that age in those golden years we didn’t ponder too much for too long. We rather watched a gray, dim dusk dip to near freezing and turn dark—never mind; we had gathered in a huge, old house, Marcia’s house, with great good friends and spaghetti on hand, with a sumptuous sauce, abundant wine and reefer to get us started. The perfect repast filled us up and helped quell the giddy anticipation that verged on anxiety. On that new frontier, we were the modern pioneers. Failure to grasp that imagery indicates absence from that moment in time. Full of laughter, good cheer, optimism and blithe spirit, we were poised to embark on a journey to the cosmos in mere minutes, like our brethren who’d landed on the moon only five months prior. They required a space ship and years of planning and a million details boiled down to perfection with technical formality that allowed no error, none. We, on the other hand needed only spaghetti, wine, reefer, good friends, LSD and a whole new decade to usher in with flourish, with unbelievable insight and fun. Just as ground control instructed Major Tom to take his protein pills and put his helmet on, we donned our game faces and popped our little space pills. Man, David Bowie was a gas, in the groove and right on. Who couldn’t feel it?

  The easy buzz and dulled edge of the reefer and wine and a hot meal soon gave way to ignition and liftoff in variable succession. The group gained orbital speed, one after another or sometimes in twos and threes. Started on the journey is what we got, most of us, in forty-five or ninety minutes. Yet I remained sated and stoned on the launch pad. I thought I’d eaten too much spaghetti, smothering the drug in pasta. The snow began falling, little, wet granules plunking along the windowsills like lunar modules plunking into the sea.

  After two hours, I thought I’d drawn a dud.

  Marcia suggested another hit, underscoring her most admirable strength, which wasn’t her moderation in all things but rather her coherence and ability to speak clearly while tripping madly.

  I declined; what if it came on along with the first hit?

  Marcia giggled, “So? You took two hits.”

  But no. I wasn’t willing to risk Mach V. I’d seen those who took multiple hits. Some of them handled it well.

  After three hours I decided to go home. So I got up from the sofa and went to the door to wrap myself in my rig. In those days it was a full-length overcoat and top hat from Goodwill along with a seven-foot muffler knitted by Old Mom, though she couldn’t see the need for seven feet of it. I explained that I needed to dress for success. Ah, success: now that she understood. Under the coat were bell-bottom jeans, a ruffled tuxedo shirt and a brown vest with keyhole piping above and below the buttonholes in gold brocade to match the epaulet fringe and needlepoint arabesques. I’d bought most of those things at Goodwill, which wasn’t hip in those days, unless you were avant-funk and knew what to look for. I got the vest the previous summer at a London flea market. I got the boots in Amsterdam for eight bucks, unbelievably cool boots with round toes instead of club toes like everyone else’s Dingos, which set me apart and helped immensely with identity, because the boots reflected the soul and more, what in later decades would be called image, and then values. How could a young man walk the earth without the right boots?

  I opened the door to see that the snowflakes had swelled to dreamy proportion—big, fluffy flakes plummeting softly as paratroopers, and a blanket already a few inches thick covered the yard, the street and the trees. The flakes zigzagged earthward on no breeze, infusing the stillness with a metronomic yet overlapping pulse that strained, nay, insisted on life, even as snow was a harbinger of Death in D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox, read only recently for personal edification; school was such a waste of time.

  But wait.

  This was life such as a hatchling might sense on its first stirring within the shell. The air felt less chilled than at sundown. It looked like the right time for a stroll, given the brisk stillness and solitary brilliance of the night. I opened the door and felt refreshed, stepping from the boisterous indoor atmosphere of friends tripping on rock and roll into a night of luminous darkness . . .

  But then Marcia, the perfect hostess for altered realities, touched me sweetly. I turned to her smile and could plainly see an original spark of love in her lovely smiling eyes as she asked where I was off to. I shrugged. She could see that I hadn’t achieved ignition, much less blast off. So she advised that I come back in and sit on the sofa and relax, because it was New Year’s Eve, and love was all around us, and because she had a special surprise, and besides all that, Ray Haney would arrive in no time with a baggy full of acid, uncapped. Ray had called to ask if we could help him cap his acid—to put the loose powder into the empty gelatin capsules, by hand, four hundred hits of it, give or take. And to think how we’d scrambled to round up a measly baker’s dozen.

  It just goes to show you. Anyway, Ray was offering samples, in case anyone needed a sample, in case anyone might want to check out ‘71, ‘72 or ‘99 while we were at it. What a laugh. What a goof. Yet we took his meaning.

  So I went back in, de-rigged and sat back on the sofa, resigned to a New Year’s Eve of love all around us, though for me it would be squeezeless and tripless. Maybe it was a first lesson in letting go of that which is desired most and that which is desired second most. In a minute or two I noticed an odd quirk in the reality/cosmic interface. Marcia’s surprise was Led Zeppelin II, which she laid into place and carefully lowered the needle to the groove—

  Led Zeppelin II?

  You got Led Zeppelin II? Never mind that it was fifteen bucks, which was nearly half my share of the rent back then. It was brand new, out only a month or two and plain unavailable in the heartland till Marcia batted her baby blues at just the right dude who worked for this amazing radio station—FM—where they played real music and had hardly any commercials and none of that Top 40 pop crap. This dude scored advance copies all the time, including Led Zeppelin II! And he gave it to Marcia! Sure, he wanted to ball her. We were okay with that, considering the offer. Most of us had only heard about Led Zeppelin’s second album and that it was even better than the first.

  Even better?

  Oh, right. But the Chosen Few who actually heard it had soberly confirmed.

  A righteous moment of silence ensued as the record spun under the needle’s sibilance that bolted into prayer, such as it was:

  You need toolin’,

  Baby I’m not foolin’.

  I’m gonna send you . . . back t
o schoolin’ . . .

  Bedom bedom Bomp! On first blush, first gasp, first absorption of first sound waves we knew it was a groove for the ages, not to mention the moment, which would linger in history forever as a moment eternal, and so it was, perfectly synchronizing time and place and mood and love and, yes, the feeling. The words floated out of the box and across the room at eye level, visibly readable in their own talk bubble, and I read along as I clearly heard them—but it wasn’t really hearing; it was absorbing, assimilating into all as all accepted as everything—this was the osmosis I’d declined to pay attention to in biology but at that moment comprehended as if . . . as if sound waves were nice but not necessary, because this was meaning conjoining with being and yes, I was off.

  And so it is, as few moments achieve.

  Before you could say downward spiraling vortex, I was way off, then more off and offer and offer, till Kenny Visser offered a cross check from a far corner of the room, the town, the Universe, giggling and calling out from his perch on the edge of the double helix of that eternal moment. Nose pressed to Marcia’s goldfish bowl, he grinned. Our viewpoints intersected much as two trekkers pass on wilderness trails on either side of an abyss high in the Himalayas. Eight feet and eons away, on his knees, he called across the canyon, “What ho?”

  “Ho?”

  In mellifluous inquiry he asked, “Is life so short that you have no time to snuggle with a snail?”

  It hadn’t seemed so short, and he wasn’t actually snuggling with a snail. He was wiping nose grease on the fishbowl, and this exchange seemed longer than life to date, what with third stage boosters kicking in, just as those big fucking canisters from the second stage fizzled out and fell away slo-mo with the fundamental stabilizers fibrillating on all seams.

  Oh, things were cracking up.

  I lay back on the sofa to fasten the figurative seatbelt, because seasoned acidnauts knew that blasting through the nowheresphere will test a system’s integrity every time, and that gyroscopic fortitude requires the vortex to spiral upward and not downward at all costs—or nearly all costs. I mean, be real. If you compound the challenges of quantum physics with the fundamental absence of a viable steering mechanism in deep space and no viable coordinates, like left, right, up and down, then navigation will default to spirit, to mood, to raw outlook, which must not look down. Not down. But up. Up, up, up.

  Wait a minute. You said no up or down.

  Yes! I didn’t mean that up and down, you simp! I meant the ultimate up or down, the one emanating from the core.

  Well, the core seemed accessible enough . . .

  Fuck me! She suggested two hits!

  But then the sofa needed nailing to the floor and the last fucking thing in the world I was up for was finding a hammer and nails. And straps, because we’d need some fucking straps, me and the sofa. And the hammer. And nails. Kenny Visser called over his shoulder, “You gotta try this, man.”

  But I couldn’t very well try anything with everything trying me—at once. In two shakes I was miraculously back up at the door and re-rigged. Did I say two? Make that one, or maybe a half, or a quarter. Eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, sixty-fourth, one-twenty-eighth.

  Chh. Chhhh. We interrupt this reality to revisit a specific moment from some years prior, in which Mr. Grayson asks an eighth grade science class: if a frog sits in the center of your desk and jumps halfway to the edge, how long will it take the frog to jump off. Some kids wave their hands madly, wanting to know the desk dimensions, as if it’s a trick question.

  But I know that it’s no trick. The frog will never go over.

  Mr. Grayson sees me staring obliquely at the self-satisfying answer, and he grants me an equally sublime smile before turning to the blackboard.

  Drawing a square with equal sides, he labels each side as two units in length. He then connects two opposite corners with a diagonal line and turns back to the class with the easy task: write down the square root of two.

  Doreen Gaunch was an anxious, straight-A girl with zits and thick, black glasses who would one day snatch an exotic beetle making the rounds for show and tell and eat it in one fell pop and crunch and then burst into tears. But that was later. In the moment she blurted that the square root of two is an infinite number and cannot be written.

  I smiled again on the right side of knowing and assured Mr. Grayson that he had written the square root of two in its obvious entirety by connecting the two opposite corners of a square measuring two equal units on all sides.

  Mr. Grayson nodded slowly. The rest of the class faded to green with envy, and like a punk not satisfied with a clear victory, I informed my dumbfounded audience that the frog would eventually fall asleep and teeter off the desk. An isolated laugh or two rounded my comedic moment as Mr. Grayson gazed at a plane of opposing logic. He seemed pleased with company at the summit with whom to enjoy the view. Mr. Pride, a dull, gray man obsessed with precision, gave me a C in Algebra and counseled that such a failure to give a shit, I mean care, could only predict the rest of life. Grayson was good for an A and a nod.

  What?

  Did I think something? I couldn’t be sure, though the next frame arrived on fast forward to a few frames up in full stride—what we called trucking—headed into town in the snow, tripping way too hard but fairly fending the heebie jeebies with physical movement that felt like the antidote for mental movement, which was over the top. No, not an antidote but a compensation. That was it, the balance of the thing, in which success was easily measured in a left, right, left as necessary, which might be forever or the rest of this night or life, whichever came first.

  I blinked to the inside lane as coming up alongside trucked Kenny Visser, his grin undiminished, pumping energy into his step with no as-if about it. He summed up the evening, the spaghetti and wine, the love all around us, the snails and snuggles, the snow and varying planes of reality in a word: “Man.”

  “Yeah.”

  Monosyllabic dialogue often indicates slang or pidgin, limited brainpower, an under-funded educational system or inbreeding. This was none of those; we were university students, a state university best known for animal husbandry, but still. Our communication was not minimal but vast, encompassing reality from molecular outward in layers with ready access to the original electrical synapse at the source of all life. What arced between us was not a short circuit but a pulse we shared with everything. Once stabilized at orbital altitude and velocity, we saw, we felt, we understood.

  Many people seek meaning in middle age, as perspective changes between the beginning and the end, asking what might survive. Some people meditate and in time can empty the vessel, still the pond’s surface, watch thoughts fly away like birds. These images help free the mind, opening it to essence. Essence is common in nature; say in a cat absorbing sunbeams, or a dog with his head out the window, or a bird singing. Sweet being can arrive, with no thoughts to disturb it. The 60s were a struggle defined by war and a nation divided—and by essence. Drugs are easily discounted, but they took us within, to see what might be.

  Kenny and I made it into town and ducked into a pizza parlor to warm up and maybe get something to eat. But we left in short order when a large pepperoni purple and flowing yellow pizza went to extra large and then jumbo and on to industrial megalith and finally Godzilla! The monster pizza rose up on dinosaur feet and roared. We gasped and ran as it chased us out and down the street. A hallucination? Maybe. But I saw it. Kenny saw it, and the converse of universal light is the other. A friend on a trip can help keep things light; we laughed like hyenas comparing details down to its curly eyelashes and nose pustules and the snot flecks dangling from the corners of its mouth. And what must have been a painful cavity in its third incisor that likely caused the bad breath too.

  We needed more wine or beer or something to take the edge off, but we dasn’t go back indoors in public—back among those who hadn’t learned that love is all around us. So we came up with the perfect solution, to head back to Marcia’s house
for a joint.

  Hardly two miles out, Marcia’s house would have been a walk in the basil, had not a GTO pulled over just ahead and waited on the snow-drifted shoulder, its throaty 389 ca-chug, ca-chugging in baritone exhalation. Kenny mimed the super car as one more element to conjoin. The door swung open on two women heavily clad and introducing themselves as Janis Joplin and Grace Slick.

  “Get in,” Grace said. So we did. We didn’t really think they were rock stars, but then we couldn’t be too sure. Mid-Missouri was full of surprises in those days. They drove us twenty miles down the road to a trailer park in Kingdom City, where their roommate Queenie, another female in XXXL, lay sprawled impatiently on her massive threadbare sofa, awaiting her pizza and beer. Grace and Janis set the box on Queenie’s belly. Queenie raised the lid to reveal the glop, no longer steaming.

  Kenny gasped, “You caught it!”

  It lay there on Queenie, congealing in its death throes. He and I glanced at each other and giggled at prospects of the pizza queen devouring the pizza. We feared another hyena round that would render us helpless among big, trailer-park women.

  Queenie caught us snickering and cried out, “Balls, cried the queen! If I had ‘um I’d be king!” The trailer wasn’t at all like Marcia’s place. Both places were tattered, but the trailer was brightly lit and slovenly, an example of the emerging phrase, trailer trash. It reflected none of the Age of Aquarius. It was a dump. I suspected Queenie’s cry of balls and kingship was regular and predictable, and sure enough.

  We entertained the three females briefly, answering their questions on how it felt to be college students and never having to work but then facing death in Vietnam as soon as we were done but then being able to finally die for our country, which should make anybody feel better about being a worthless piece o’ shit for four years straight. “God, I hate those chickenshit fuckers!” Queenie cried out before leveling her gaze for the follow up. “Are you guys chickenshit?”