by Clifton Ross
As my father erased the board, he felt his left arm go numb.
We arrived back in the US from England the year before England, in the form of the Beatles, arrived in the US It was the year before the US jumped, with both boots, into Vietnam with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the year before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. All those factors would come to bear on my life in some way or another, and to a greater or lesser degree.
I wasn’t prepared for the racism in South Carolina. The military bases had long before been integrated, and until my first year in public schools off base all my classrooms had been integrated. School integration in South Carolina didn’t take place for two more school years when, suddenly, the African-American students entered to take seats in the back of the classrooms. I remember trying to make friends with one black student named Calhoun, only to find to my disappointment he refused to speak to me or acknowledge me.
My father was a conservative and I remember him calling Martin Luther King a “communist,” but my mother was anti-racist and wouldn’t allow the “N” word to be spoken in our house. When African-Americans attempted to enter the white Presbyterian Church in Sumter and were blocked at the doors, the story made big news in The Sumter Daily Item. I asked my mother why white people wouldn’t let black people into their churches, and, with a disgusted look on her face, she said, “because they’re ignorant.”
No such attempts were made by blacks to enter the Hickory Road Baptist Church in Cherryvale, the little community across from Shaw Air Force Base, where we lived. The church was white and strictly Evangelical, and its members were probably more racist than Sumter’s Presbyterians. Cherryvale itself was white from the center to its margins. But just outside the margins were the cotton fields that ran to the edges of swampy forests and there, down winding, sandy dirt roads, were the tin-roofed, bleached-wood shacks of the black families. They would come through Cherryvale, but rarely would stop unless it was the vegetable vendor, the old man who rode around the neighborhood with his horse-drawn cart, brimming with fruits and vegetables he had for sale. But mostly I was oblivious to the racism, and eventually accepted it as given, because I was white and it didn’t concern me—or so I thought in those days.
Already in the fourth grade I noticed that my teachers were more interested in the “correct” answers than they were in the true answers. I’d learned that the hard way in my final exam in history, science, and social studies when I missed only two questions. To the question “Who discovered America?” I wrote, “Leif Erikson.” As to the shape of the earth, I had written “egg-shaped.” Despite my arguments, my teacher insisted that my answers were “not the right answers.” This was the real beginning of my education about education.
Then in sixth grade a scrawny bald kid wearing a strange double-breasted grey shirt was introduced into the classroom as the new student. His name was Michael Duffy, and we would soon become best friends.
For the first few weeks Michael kept to himself. He claimed to be in communication with Martians, and I would often find him on the playground looking off into the sky, obviously in the midst of sending them telepathic messages. He said he was requesting that they pick him up. That it was time for him to “go home.” I wondered if there was something to this, and I hoped they might take me along with them when they came to pick him up, so I often stood nearby when he was “in communication.”
Eventually Michael was able to let go of his identity as a Martian to become just another boy on the playground, and that was when we really became friends. For the rest of the year we spent most of our free time together writing a book about two young boys who were inseparable friends and had all sorts of adventures together. Michael and I, by contrast with the heroes of our stories, had very few big adventures, but we had lots of fun imagining them.
Eventually we decided to serialize the book and publish it in the form of comics that we duplicated with carbon paper, and eventually with a mimeograph Michael’s father had in his antiques and junk store. We started selling the comics for the price of lunch, since we knew every student arrived at school with at least a quarter in his or her pocket.
Michael’s memory of this incident is far sharper than mine. Years later he told me that we were called into the principal’s office one day after lunch and had our money, and comics, confiscated. It was becoming clear to me that I lived in a world of total coercion: from home, to school, to life around the military base. This awareness conflicted with the world my parents told me I lived in. They had instilled other values in me, among them, perhaps the highest among them, being “freedom, democracy, and independence.” But where was the freedom? And what democracy? Certainly not at home, nor, as I had discovered, at school. I began to suspect it was a total lie. It wouldn’t be long before I would have that suspicion confirmed, and by none other than my father.
One older friend, my next-door neighbor, Buddy Dorsey, eventually left school after passing two years through nearly every grade, that is, advancing by “social promotion” all the way to the eighth grade. There, however, the “Peter Principle” kicked in and he hit the glass ceiling of junior high, since social promotion didn’t apply beyond the eighth grade. At first he tried to make a living selling rose trellises and doing odd jobs that didn’t seem to suit him, and so he joined the Marines and shipped off to Vietnam. Not long after, he was hit by a friendly mortar, which took out part of his skull and left him with a metal plate in his head and partially paralyzed. He returned home a quieter person, a good part of his life gone missing with fragments of his skull.
That was when I began to wonder why we were in Vietnam, so one evening I asked my father. My father was a conservative, but he was also an honest man. He sat down on the end of my bed and looked me in the eye. “I’ll tell you why we in Vietnam,” he said in his thick Okie drawl. “We in Vietnam cause we got us a war economy in this country. If we pulled out of Vietnam we’d go right into a depression.” He stood up, looked at me and nodded. “That’s why we in Vietnam.” And he concluded, “we gotta have us a war to keep the economy goin.’” Then he turned and left the room.
I sat there shocked for a moment. Was that really it? We were selling our young men, sending them off to die, to “keep the economy going”? I felt my whole world suddenly turning upside-down. Then everything I had believed was, indeed, an enormous lie.
And so I rebelled. In seventh grade my rebellion became too much for even Michael to accompany. I joined an eighth grade group of Southern hoodlums who combed their hair back “greaser” style, wore the collars of their shirts turned up, taps on their shoes, and smoked Marlboros out behind the bathrooms. I did all that in perfect imitation, following them the next year into eighth grade where I was able to sit in the same classes with most of them who had, fittingly, failed the grade.
But already, unbeknownst to me, another path of rebellion was opening in the great world beyond my own little Cherryvale. With the magic of television, the big cultural changes of the moment were coming, even to Sumter, South Carolina. The Beatles were the major point of departure in the culture, although it would be a couple more years before we fully grasped what we had departed into. The counterculture that had been seething in the subterranean realm of the collective unconscious of the US was preparing to explode into public view with sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Randy Gossett was another friend who lived down the road from me. Together we’d started smoking cigarettes and drinking on the weekends. Randy’s older brothers, Gary and Jeff, were beginning to listen to strange music and wear odd clothes and grow their hair over their ears. Jeff, the oldest, one night ended up in the hospital for from a strange new drug known as “LSD.” It was the first known incident of such a thing in Sumter County, and Sherriff Byrd Parnell, a reputed member of the KKK and future president of the National Sheriffs’ Association (1973–1974), and his entire force decided they were going to have to watch the Gossett boys, including Ran
dy who was, at that time, passing through his second year in the sixth grade and waiting on his “social promotion” to seventh.
I was in the eighth grade and at school I found a copy of Life magazine dedicated to a strange group of people in California called “hippies” who believed in free love and took LSD and other drugs. Gary Gossett, the middle brother, began wearing blue tinted glasses and playing drums in a rock band that Jeff had named “White Light.” Unlike the numerous local Motown covers bands (most of them named “The Tempests” or something like that) White Light played psychedelic music. Gary drove the school bus and seemed to manage to live in both the straight and hippie worlds quite well, but Jeff was another matter.
Jeff, I knew, “knew.” Jeff didn’t fit, by any stretch of the imagination, in the “straight” world. He was a “head”; his hair was growing longer and longer, and he wore a leather fringe jacket, and he became my hero. That presented a real problem for my father because Jeff was not only a hippie, and a drug user, but my very perceptive father was also quite clear that Jeff was not “straight” in another way: he was a homosexual.
One day a friend a couple years older than me invited me into his garage. He had something he wanted to tell me about. We went into the garage and he looked around to make sure we were alone. Then he put on a record. It was Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women.” I’d never heard Bob Dylan before, and I didn’t much care for the song. Then he pulled out a bag and asked me if I’d ever sniffed paint. I shook my head. He pulled a can of spray paint off the shelf, sprayed into the bag, then covered his face with the bag and began breathing deeply. Soon his eyes glazed over and he handed me the bag. I took a few deep breaths and then my head began buzzing and the music changed and I remember very little else, except that I liked it. This incident led to a small group of us, Randy, his friend Chuck, and one or two others, gathering in the woods near our old fort so we could sniff glue, or glue and lighter fluid.
Fortunately, this was a “stage” most of us passed through quickly, although one of the gang stayed there a little too long and became a rather demented character that eventually had to be withdrawn from seventh grade.
Soon our little gang was raiding the parents’ liquor and medicine cabinets, the latter containing a wealth of inconceivably diverse treasures as only exist in military families, since military doctors were renowned above all others for their free dispensing of prescriptions.
We were a ragtag bunch, although Michael had a definite style, perhaps due to his earlier long sojourn among Martians and his work with his father. Through his father’s antique business he managed to pull together a consummate wardrobe of a top hat, a tuxedo and a cane. He would often be seen in this outfit, wearing blue or black jeans, and tennis shoes, or just going barefoot. But he was the exception. The rest of us dressed in some hippie fashion that was more down at the heels, and we thus earned the disdain and opprobrium of the culture we rejected, which in this case was the good folks of Sumter.
The young Southern gentry of Sumter called us “Shaw Trash” and we called them “Grits.” They dressed in tasseled loafers, dress pants, double-stitched shirts with button down collars and London Fogs and wore their hair short, or in bangs, discreetly cut in a perfectly straight line above the eyebrows. They cruised the streets of Sumter in their Mustangs, listening to Motown, but hating blacks and always looking for someone to beat up on.
We lived up to our names, wearing long hair, patched faded and holey blue jeans and often going barefoot or, when the sand was too hot, in tennis shoes. We listened to Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Steppenwolf, and anything rock, and believed in peace and unity of all people. They drank beer and liquor; we smoked pot and took LSD. To them we were the reincarnation of the Yankee Army, and to us, they were redneck racists. Perhaps both sides were right.
I suspect that Project MK Ultra was responsible for the fact that so much LSD was floating around Shaw Air Base, and I took as much of it as I could, sometimes for days on end. I know for a fact that our little group was under surveillance because I saw the men in the black Galaxy 500 wearing black suits and dark sunglasses who would often show up at the Piggly Wiggly where we congregated. They would sit there, taking notes, and occasionally taking photos. Once I had a bad LSD trip and was picked up walking through the base and taken into the Air Police (AP) station for questioning. A man who identified himself as being from the Office of Strategic Intelligence came in during the interrogation and he described to me everything I’d done that day, down to conversations I’d had.
And the more drugs I took, the crazier I naturally got. Those days, my father would later tell me, he slept with a pistol under his pillow, wondering when or if he might need it to protect himself from me. At some point in the middle of these insane few years, I suspect just to be able to sleep again, my father brought home a storage shed he’d bought from Shaw Air Force Base surplus, and put it in the backyard. He told me he didn’t want me living in the house, but he was willing to continue feeding me, as he was legally obligated to do, as long as I lived in the shed.
I didn’t take the offer amiss: I was quite happy since now, at the age of sixteen, I would have my own space to take whatever drugs came my way and quietly travel astral planes in the safety of my military surplus shed. My friends and I named my shed “The Time Machine” and I decorated it with a black light and posters that Randy drew for the space. Randy, Michael, and I spent our evenings there, drinking or using drugs and listening to music. I remember one night in particular we listened to the title cut of Steppenwolf’s new album, Monster, over and over. The song explained all US history and its beautiful chorus to this day brings tears to my eyes: “America, where are you now? Don’t you care about your sons and daughters? Don’t you know, we need you now; we can’t fight alone against the Monster.”
But I knew my search was coming to an end as I found myself veering closer to self-destruction than I’d ever been before. My life was disintegrating and I felt lost, confused, and out of control. My father was going through his own crisis and in 1970 he bought a farm in Oklahoma and within a few months we moved back to the community he’d grown up in. But before we moved back to Oklahoma I had an experience that changed my life.
Chapter Two: Saved!
Jackie Adair was a friend of the family and she knew I was in deep trouble. She’d recently been “born again” and she invited me to go with her to Rock Hill to meet some “Jesus freaks.” I accepted her invitation and we drove up and met a young Christian hippie couple and after a long conversation, I prayed with them and became a Christian. The conversion was immediately dramatic, perhaps intensified by the amount of LSD and marijuana still in my system. Over the coming weeks and months I had visions; I spoke in tongues; I saw Jesus bleeding for me on a cross when I closed my eyes and prayed; I saw the light of God.
Jackie had Bible studies in her trailer most evenings, and they became charismatic prayer sessions. I was convinced that Jesus would be returning any day now and taking us all up in the Rapture.1 I was certain of it. I walked around looking up at the clouds and wondering when I would see His face. What would it look like? How would it be that he would be seen everywhere at the same time? I hadn’t made it to physics in high school… perhaps if I had, I’d understand a bit more how that would work, I thought.
Over the next few years as I bounced back and forth between Oklahoma and South Carolina I was in and out of cults, sects, and churches of fairly extreme varieties. I spent two weeks with the Children of God, also known as the “Family International” near Pike’s Peak in.2 I fled that cult one morning by walking miles down an icy road, before catching a ride into the safety of Colorado Springs where I caught a bus home. But no doubt my time at Joseph S. Carroll’s Evangelical Institute (EI) in Greenville, South Carolina took the cake.
The EI was just down the road from Bob Jones University, the institution of higher learning affectionately referred to by the locals as “the Bijoux.” I went to work at EI in early 1972 and
was housed with an elderly couple who were really lovely people. They had no children of their own, and immediately adopted me with all the love, concern, and controlling behavior any good Fundamentalist Christian couple would demonstrate toward their own child.
Perhaps it was because I was still in the process of coming down off what had essentially been a prolonged LSD trip from 1970–1971. Perhaps because I was a recent convert to Christianity trying to hard not to think of songs from George Harrison’s Radha Krsna Temple album (which my friends and I used to listen to as we tripped) that I couldn’t help obsessing on them.3 As George Lakoff reminds us, and as anyone who has had the experience of trying not to think of an elephant will know, all anyone in such a situation can do is think of an elephant.
In any case I began obsessing on the songs to the “foreign deities” and found it distressing. When I mentioned this problem to members of the EI, I was referred to the Reverend himself who informed me that I was possessed by demons and he made an appointment with me for the exorcism. I was alarmed but he reassured me that demon possession wasn’t a really big deal, and mumbled something about it being no more problematic than “a common cold.”
That Sunday we met in his office and the exorcism began, with Carroll and other elders laying hands on me and commanding the demons to leave me in the name of Jesus. Nothing happened.