Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  ised by the goddamn team of blind eye doctors at Stanford Medical.) My only other option would have been the Veterans Hospital at Palo Alto, where I might have fallen into the hands of fiendish interns and orderlies like Vic Lovell and Ken Kesey. I can only hope Wally (which, by the way, I never called him) didn’t really remember me as a sharper who conned an extra year out of his good-heartedness. The records are presumably still at Stanford Hospital and should speak for themselves for anyone interested. When the term was done, and with it my stay at the art foundation, I started back east. I didn’t have to hitchhike this time or ride any rails, but the price of an airline ticket was beyond me. I took a Grey- hound bus east the day after Barry Goldwater lost the Oregon primary to George Romney. I’d been riding the Dawg since my mother’s first month as a single mom and it was home on wheels for me. Once my hair had grown back, along with my affected chin whis- kers, I hadn’t thought much about my appearance. I was wearing a secondhand Forest Service khaki shirt, hiking boots, and some spare socks and things to change into at stopovers. We had rolled no far- ther than Sacramento when I first sensed the poor impression I was making on the continent’s interior. A stroll around the block near the Greyhound station seemed to draw the attention of passersby. Skid row types cursed at me instead of panhandling. Cops grinned unpleasantly as though entertaining law enforcement fantasies. When I climbed back in the bus none of the passengers liked me very much anymore. Was it me? Was it Sacramento? In downtown Salt Lake City, a team of cops, two of them, gave me a ticket for smoking a cigarette in Temple Square. One of the officers suggested I might be wanting a shave. Otherwise I might have more trouble. On the other hand, he said, I might be looking for trouble. I might like trouble. prime green: remembering the sixties 107

  I recalled that the Great Dowser Joseph Smith, whose American Gothic spook house we were at that moment honoring, had liked trouble so much, along with killing people who crossed him and claiming that all sorts of jailbait schoolgirls were his wives, that once upon a time cops like themselves had stood by to allow frontier justice to take its course. He was usually represented as needing a shave too, on the very day of his lynching. I made no historical refer- ences at the time. I should mention also that my brief, costly foray around the square afforded me the discovery that Mormons were the most physically beautiful people in the country, maybe the most beautiful of all Caucasians, if Nordics are what you like. Clean liv- ing? Good sex? No caffeine? Their affinity for dancing or a gene pool of strivers? I had no time to linger for research that day. The next eastbound Hound left within an hour of my citation, and I chose to be on it. In Chicago I got off again to walk the streets with my Stanford friend Irving Kupferman. Irving and I had engaged in a rivalry over a woman back in Palo Alto. Then we had somehow taken acid to- gether and become good friends. We were both displaced New Yorkers, and what we liked to do was walk. We walked all over Chicago, so stoned at times we thought we were in some part of New York we’d never seen before. We ended up at an enormous ex- hibit of contemporary American work at the Art Institute. I had lived in Chicago with my mother for a while, in a Salvation Army Booth Shelter on the North Side. If I’ve placed it right, it had been gentrified by 1964 into urban aristocracy. When Mom and I lived there, the kids from the shelter were the only racial mix of kids for miles. Moreover, we were some kind of low-rent Protestant bas- tards. The neighborhood kids, Poles, Germans—Cubs fans, anyway—made life difficult. One of Lake Michigan’s beaches was 108 robert stone

  not far away, but to reach it we had to elude ambush. Of all the kids in the Booth Shelter, the biggest and toughest was an African Amer- ican girl of twelve or so named Gilda. The Wendish barbarians who pursued us had a reluctance to tangle with Gilda, so as often as pos- sible we Boothies made her our guest at the beach—teaching her to swim, buying her “red hots,” as the locals called hot dogs, and ice cream, purchased by pooling our resources. I think some of the kids intimidated other children into contributions. Anyway, she loved fighting white boys. God, she was bad! She had to be. She was no help against black kids, though; the presence of black male adolescents made her go all funny and shy. However, the neighborhood was so venomously racist that there weren’t many black kids. Maybe I’m idealizing Gilda, but I don’t remember her picking on anyone who didn’t pick on her. She had a great laugh. It was pretty progressive of the Salvation Army to plunk down a Booth Shelter in that part of town. Nevertheless, I was not fond of the Army. They punished me for teaching other children Go Fish. Cards were wicked and they confiscated mine. They thought my mother had airs above herself and looked down on Salvation Army workers. They were goddamn right about that. Her punishment was nightly pot walloping. My mother was straight, sexwise, but her inmate pal was a small wizened lesbian with a face like a movie jockey’s who knew the ways of the world well enough to make intelligent conversation. Or at least to listen patiently to my mother’s version. She was nice to me, this lady. I had never seen anyone like her. One day, the papers advertised that the sponsors of the Chicago railroad fair were granting free admission to children with over a hundred freckles. Nothing on my face had ever got me anything so far. So I mapped out a route to the fairgrounds and for hours rode the prime green: remembering the sixties 109

  incredible green high-speed trolleys. The guards at the fair gave me a hard time until I thought I wouldn’t get in, but they were only kidding. The theme of this 1948 railroad fair as I remember was how wonderful passenger trains were going to be in the future. I can still remember how those brand-new shining coach cars and com- partments smelled. It made a kid feel lucky to be born to such an in- heritance. I could hardly wait. The future these railroads were promising us was part of the POSTWAR WORLD, or, as it was frequently known, THE WORLD OF TOMORROW. After a day there I took the wonderful trolleys back to the Booth, and being there didn’t bother me a bit. That night Mom and the little jockey lady interrupted their covert two- handed bridge game in the scullery to teach me how the game went. Irving and I spent a lot of time retracing some of my Chicago hangouts and then he took the el down to the University of Chicago, where he was working. Shortly after, he went to Chile to study in a psycho-physiological program, and I lost touch with him. By the time I got on the New York bus I was pretty near exhaus- tion in addition to being ripped on the dope we’d been smoking all day. I bought a pint of ordinary rye at a liquor store next to the ter- minal, figuring it might provide the balance of energy and relax- ation I might require. I had a seat on the aisle halfway back on the bus. I slept for a while. When I woke up I saw a pretty blond girl across the aisle from me. I was not in the mood for hitting on strange young ladies, nor was it something I often did. But she looked across the aisle, saw that I was awake, and asked how long I’d been traveling. I told her pretty much nonstop since San Francisco. She said I looked it, asked me if whiskey helped. I offered her some and to my surprise she took it and helped herself to a fair slug. I saw that she was not as young as I had first thought. Not middle-aged, 110 robert stone

  but not a postadolescent either. She was South African, riding on one of Greyhound’s See America cards. She said she loved traveling at night except where you missed the beautiful scenery. While our conversation flickered along, I was becoming more and more aware of the men sitting in the seats behind us. Boarding, I had seen that they were U.S. Navy sailors. This inclined me favor- ably toward them in general. I noticed that their neckerchiefs were badly, inexpertly rolled, which let me know that they were unfamil- iar with the dress uniform. The sailors wearing their hats had not learned how to bend the outside rims to look squared away. Then I saw that they all had the same rating mark: two white lines parallel at an angle. As I suspected they were boots, that is, recruits just out of boot camp, and since they had boarded at Chicago, it had proba- bly been the Recruit Training Station at Great Lakes, Illinois. It occurred to me that they had given me sort of contemptuous looks as I got on the bus, the kind I had seen in Sacramento and Salt Lake. But because the
y were Navy apprentices, and I was an ex–petty officer with a little brace of service ribbons, so dominant in time and rank—I felt—I couldn’t take their bug looks seriously. I couldn’t help feeling a certain sympathy also. Navy boot camp had softened up by the sixties, but it couldn’t have been an easy experi- ence for a young person even then. I didn’t like the way they sounded, though. Not that I was hear- ing menace, just a kind of nastiness in the rise and fall of their voices. They seemed to have a leader who spoke the way they did, only more unpleasantly. Nor did I care for the kind of stage-whisper vocalizings. Every time I took a swallow of the whiskey, or offered one across the aisle, they would all fall silent. By the time their whispered exchanges got my attention the South African across the way had gone to sleep. These guys weren’t prime green: remembering the sixties 111

  talking to me, but I couldn’t help believing they were talking about me. Why? It really didn’t make any sense. Did my pint bottle of booze arouse their envy and rage? Did they think I was chatting up a girlfriend? Impossible. So I kept trying to make the talk I was hearing come out differently. Naturally I have trouble re-creating dialogue I was trying to mis- understand. As I heard it, what they were saying, the young leader and his pals, went something like this: “Fuggin beatnik, we can teach him to ride right. Who the fug he think he is.” This sounded like Pittsburgh to me, the gerund Nor- man Mailer employed to ease the realistic soldier speech in The Naked and the Dead being a common usage in the Steel City. Pitts- burgh was always a righteously tough town but never had more than its share of sociopaths. Moreover, the bus wasn’t headed for Pittsburgh. “We can’t jump him in the bus.” “Fug, we can’t. Nobody sticks up for fuggers like that. See people lookin’ at him funny? With the booze and tryin’ to make the [woman].” “We could kill the fugger.” A thoughtful silence ensued. No one laughed although I waited. “We could,” the same voice insisted. “There’s just yams back here.” Most of the passengers in the middle of the bus were black. Yam, I knew, was American street Sicilian for blacks. Whether it was more universally used in Pittsburgh I couldn’t say. “They wouldn’t do shit. The yams? They wouldn’t see nothing, ya know it? Noaw. They just set back and be cool and don’t see nothin’ and don’t remember nothin’.” 112 robert stone

  This came with a mixture of racist dialect comedy and complacent admiration. Another youth then said: “I don’t want to kill nobody.” “Then whadya jern the Navy fer?” the leader asked, sounding upset. I was trying about as hard as I ever had to reject the evidence of my senses. How could anyone have the bad luck to end up on a bus full of homicidal morons and become the object of their violence? Finally I stopped trying to not hear these ravings and went to work on a strat- egy. One rule of counterambush: Take the initiative. Always know a little more about what will happen next than your opponent, if pos- sible. Start it yourself. I had figured out who the leader was. The way was to walk back there and double-talk down into his face until he ran out of energy and looked like a jerk to his friends. Sucker-punch him if necessary. I knew all this from some experience. But it was I who was running out of energy, with my road visits and boozings. I did a sensible adult sort of thing, and of course it doomed me. I walked up to the driver and told him that sailors in the seat be- hind, about six of them, I figured, were planning to assault me. “Why?” As he took his eyes off the road long enough to ask me this, I could see enough of his face in the night lights to realize that he sort of understood why. I was tempted to ask him his theory. But all at once I got it—Sacramento, Salt Lake, here and there in Chicago, beatnik, wrongo. The wars were heating up, the one in Vietnam, the one against white supremacy, the culture wars, as we have learned to call them. I was behind enemy lines, overtaken by the opening attacks, outnumbered. The driver told me that he was connected by radio band with the police. It sounded as much like a threat as reassurance. Then, having prime green: remembering the sixties 113

  misplayed my weak card, I went back to my seat. All was silence. The recruits appeared asleep. A while thereafter they started whis- pering together and the guy I thought of as the leader, the youth who did the talking, walked up to the driver. He looked back in my direction, appearing innocent, confused, and hurt. He and the driver had a quick exchange and ended up laughing together. This was not good. As the boot passed me on the way to his seat he leaned down close to my ear and whispered very softly: “Fuggin faggot!” The rule I had learned was don’t let anything like that pass. Re- spond or it will be the worse for you. “You talking to me?” I asked as grimly as I could in those days be- fore Bob De Niro. “Fag,” he whispered again. I liked the way he kept his voice low. On the considerable downside, it looked to me like what was com- ing next was a charge that I had propositioned him or his pals. There was a small coterie of servicemen who picked up money robbing homosexuals who approached them for sex. The defense always put forth was the defense of manly virtue. This lowlife and his band did not seem to have been in the Navy long enough to have taken this up. To paraphrase Hemingway, they did not know they were queer- rollers yet but they would find out when the time came. If they made a move, that would be their story. I would then learn how to ride right, if they had the good sportsmanship not to kill me. Eventually, we pulled into the next rest stop. It was in a town just over the Pennsylvania line from Ohio, a town whose name I will not forget and a place I think about, though briefly, pretty much every day. Highspire, PA. Makes a pretty sound when the locals say it with their whiny diphthongs. It was still dark when we filed into the fluorescent glare of the ser- vice counter. There was a separate area with tables and a little sign 114 robert stone

  over the entrance that said Servicemen and Teamsters Only. It re- minded me of signs I’d seen in some towns that lived off the Navy that read Whites Only followed by No Dogs or Sailors. In jolly Highspire attitudes were simple. I got the sense that people in the place, bus passengers and other customers, truck drivers, waitresses in their blue-and-white ging- ham uniforms, and of course my onetime shipmates—the lot of them—were eyeing me. Some people had stayed inside the bus to sleep. Inclined as I was to empty my bladder, I didn’t want any part of that place’s men’s room. That was where I’d get it. Some of the priv- ileged teamsters were already in humorous conversation with the sailors. Cooks and pearl divers would open the service door to the counter from time to time, anticipating some amusement. I wasn’t going into the gents but I figured I could find a discreet place outside. I paid for my undrunk coffee and went out. Naturally I saw myself as the center of all attention. What, who, was there to talk about in Highspire, PA, in the darkness before dawn? I pissed in the shadows of the lawn in the rear of the building. No damage done, but it had been a stupid move, illegal and throwing me open to all kinds of dirty-minded prosecutions, for which, in those enlightened days, people had their houses painted red or burned down. The sky was beginning to lighten. The highway carried scant morning traffic between two wooded ridges whose eastern peaks were just visible in outline. To the west the crests disappeared into darkness and fog. It was cold and I was tired, too cold and tired to realize how angry I was. I was probably less angry than I might have been because the improbability and absurdity of the circumstances made them difficult to focus on. prime green: remembering the sixties 115

  The cold reminded me that I had left a jacket on my seat in the bus, and my impulse was to keep my possessions in one place. I went back aboard and grabbed my jacket and also my old Navy seabag in which I’d stowed everything I owned, including the manuscript of my ongoing and ongoing first novel. The Navy recruits were scout- ing the grounds for me. When they saw me climbing out of the bus with my stuff they started yelling. One of them said I had his seabag, and maybe he thought I had. People sleeping in the bus woke up and looked out. Customers and help crowded to the diner windows. The sailors had taken off their jumper, the uniform top that is worn instead of a shirt, and were stripped above the waist to T-shirts. An elderly lady who’d come out of the diner clucked con- cern ov
er the lads’ exposure to wind and weather. She had a buddy, another elderly lady, to console her. “Oh,” the other old bitch sighed reverently, “they’re used to it.” Then both old bitches resumed bug-looking me and squawking to the driver that I was holding some brave young sailor’s seabag. While the crowd surrounded me I had to show the driver my Naval Reserve ID. To match the serial number on the bag. By law I had been transferred into the Naval Reserve at discharge, so I owed the Navy some inactive time. Wondrous to behold I was a brave young sailor too, beard and outrageous costume notwithstanding. So I crashed through the encircling citizens while the boots shouted after me and ladies screamed. A bunch of truck drivers were standing be- side the diner door watching the passengers reboard. A couple of them came up to me. One of the guys looked over his shoulder as though checking for witnesses. There were plenty of witnesses, white, black, young and old. “Where you going?” said one of the truckers. 116 robert stone