As for school, I knew it was just a matter of time before I’d drop out. If I finished and got a fine and professional arts degree, what could I do with it anyway? Become a teacher? That wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t need a degree to be a painter; I didn’t see that getting a degree would have any value at all. But I needed time to work out where I was going to jump. I didn’t have a clue.
All I knew for sure was that I wanted to see the world. How was I going to go about it? Well, I didn’t know. But I thought if I kept not doing what I didn’t want to do, I would naturally get closer to what I did want. Common sense. Never mind intentions. Everybody had good intentions, but they usually crapped out anyway. I didn’t want intentions; I wanted the facts.
—
I walked downtown to Water Street every night and sat on a doorstep with a slice of pizza outside one of the twenty-seven bars that attracted all the dregs from northeastern Ohio every weekend: assorted strays, bikers and fuckups, the people I wanted to know.
Everything at my parents’ had been so unforgiving, conservative and unwelcoming of anything out of the norm. Now I could dive in—sit in a doorway eating pizza and not have to tell anyone where I was or when I’d be home. No reporting back to headquarters; no “Aye, aye, commander!” Oh, yeah. This was, as my dad would say, “the nuts!”
I’d walk up North Main Street to my new friend Monkey Bill’s place. The houses in Kent were big old wooden Ohio houses with verandas. A gaggle of nonstudents—giggling, stoned goofies—would pile into the back of Bill’s pickup truck and we’d bomb out to Brady Lake, pick cherries, then jump into the lake for a swim.
One afternoon, I spent an hour scrubbing out the stains in the ancient porcelain sink in Bill’s kitchen until it gleamed brilliant white. I was always good at making things or cleaning—good with my hands—and I couldn’t wait for him to see it. But his reaction was scathing.
“It took a year to get it like that!” he snarled, revealing a glimpse of something at odds with pacifism and his usual laid-back demeanor. Well, everyone has boundaries.
I had real hippies for friends now. It was even better than I’d hoped for. There was a guy who lived in Ravenna, eight miles up the road, who we called “the Tim Buckley guy” because he had the hair, work shirt, beads and was slight and poetic-looking. Probably every town had a Tim Buckley guy. And now I had a work shirt, beads and was trying to be poetic-looking.
I didn’t have a care in the world, except for my concern that I was going to blow it and get thrown out if I flunked out. It was kind of a foregone conclusion, so I just tried not to think about it. I could get a job and a room somewhere, surely.
My parents had never hit me or come home drunk or done anything abusive, but I was still scared of them. That’s how it was. Parents were the law. Nothing was negotiable. I tiptoed around them. It didn’t stop me doing stuff behind their back that would have horrified them, though. I think I just didn’t have much self-discipline—I was always average.
I’d hang out in Orville’s or JB’s or the Pirate’s Alley, the main bars on Water Street. You could shoot pool in Orville’s and it had a vending machine that had pistachio nuts. I loved to get the red dye from them all over my fingers. I’d never had pistachio nuts before; I was getting worldly.
—
By September, the fall term, I’d passed and was still enrolled. I’d moved up in the world, out of Fletcher Hall, and had my own box room with a single bed and desk in Leebrick Hall. I was very pleased with the arrangement, just getting settled in, stretching out with my desert boots up on the bed, contemplating how I’d get through this next term when…a knock at the door.
“Hi, I’m Debbie—in the room next door. I wondered if you’d like to go out and get a hamburger with me.”
“Debbie,” her hair in pigtails, was wearing a V-neck sweater and pleated skirt. I winced and declined, but within a week she too had become psychedelicized, her hair returning to its natural frizz, almost an afro. It turned out that she loved rock music as much as I did. Ditto a joint and a tab. I renamed her Stella, after Star-eyed Stella, S. Clay Wilson’s dyke-pirate heroine. (You couldn’t call someone “Debbie” on acid, it just wasn’t right.)
I now had a pal to get fucked up with. Dianne had gone to Ohio State in Columbus, so I couldn’t make her do stuff with me, but it was a great setup with Stella in the next room. (She never ate a hamburger again, either. Well, who could on acid?)
A willing student, history-major Stella would smoke weed all night while studying, then pass out listening to side one of Neil Young so that everybody else on our floor would eventually have to listen to the record on heavy rotation as it got to the end of “The Old Laughing Lady” and the needle rose and dropped back to the first track—over and over and on into the next morning at full blast, Stella oblivious to the phone ringing next to her head and fists pounding on her door. She could listen to Hendrix on headphones while brushing up on Shakespeare. Nothing could impair her academic prowess. Not even hanging out with Stupid here could compromise her good habits. She was my opposite. You know, yin and yang.
But dorm life didn’t suit me. My nomadic inclinations becoming manifest, I started a long-lasting habit of uprooting and moving every three months.
My calligraphy professor (Kent offered some good alternative courses for dummies), Doug Unger, must have noticed my general uninterest but gave me A’s—the only A’s I’d ever got in my life outside of art. I couldn’t relate to an authority figure, though, even if he was only in his twenties. Stories about students getting it on with teachers seemed far-fetched to me. “Naw—who would do that?”
He presumably saw some kind of potential in me because he kept on giving me A’s, I guess to encourage me. Maybe he, playing the good teacher and all, could see I was miserable and thought he could get through to me. Of course, there’s an outside chance that I was actually good at calligraphy, but I doubt that. I could hardly even write. Good with pen and ink though. Who knows?
Then he offered me the one place available per semester in his instrument-making class. I hadn’t even asked for it; he just offered it to me, such a thoughtful man he was. Great! A class of one. And this was something I could actually use. I loved dulcimers and owned one already. Joni Mitchell!
I took a long time selecting the perfect rosewood—dark and fragrant, a pungent, sexy wood—and began planing and carving and gluing and steaming and bending it into shape. I glued many layers together to form a block and proceeded to carve the headstock, all that whittling I’d done as a kid paying off. I was on my way to making a beautiful dulcimer. And so I found out that there really are good teachers who want to go out of their way to help problem students. Unger had entirely too much faith in me in thinking I’d finish it, though.
I met Hoover at KSU too. She was friendly with the “get-down boys”—the few guys on campus who dressed like the Faces and liked English bands. There were about seven of them, all told, out of a student body of ten thousand. And, like me, Hoover was good at giving get-down haircuts. She had a VW Beetle and would drive to wherever we needed to go to see a band. So, apart from classes, school was starting to shape up very nicely indeed.
10
FOUR DAYS IN MAY
I got through the autumn quarter and was hanging in, barely. That is, I hadn’t flunked out yet, an achievement in itself. I went to a few art-history classes, but not many. I got a job modeling for the sculpture department so I had enough spare change to get me through the weekends.
The winter term was unremarkable. It’s too cold in Ohio in the winter to do much. Well, I guess I could have gone to classes. I did go half the time but resented assignments. I thought I should be more spontaneous than that if I was supposed to be an artist. Lazy, really. I balked at any kind of instruction.
I discovered an off-campus horseback riding class, to my joy, which accredited points so it counted as part of the curriculum. Even that didn’t go well for me when I went to the stable one morning to “
tack up,” having not been to bed after a night of experimentation. It became obvious that I was still tripping when I tried to get the harness on my horse. He was gigantic and getting bigger. With only the two of us in the stall, he could tell, sure as shit, I was off my head. You know it’s bad when a horse is eyeballing you like something’s wrong. He tried to back up but there was nowhere for the freaked-out animal to go. I could see getting the bit in his mouth would be impossible in the state I was in, so I mumbled an apology, frantically wrestling with the sliding bolt on the door and got out of there before one of us got hurt.
After all my aspirations to be a great horsewoman, I counted that as a personal tragedy and was ashamed. I never told anyone about that day. (Presumably neither did he. Hard to know for sure on acid. Mr. Ed.) My definitive failure.
I had to offer myself up to the psychology department, as they needed humans to run some experiments on. It was a way to earn the credits I needed to pass, and it was starting to look like I’d need more of these extra credits than most. Art students had to do shit like that, I guess, so that we did something other than just noodle around. In the “experiment” I was instructed to press a button every time a certain image came up on a screen. The guy conducting the test raised his eyebrows and told me that I had the fastest reaction times of any woman they’d tested on campus. Like a man, I guess. What good was that going to do me?
That was about it for my life of academia. Sometimes there’d be a gig on and Hoover would drive us. One night, we went to Pittsburgh, a hundred miles through a terrible blizzard to see the Kinks. Every time a truck passed, the little Beetle pulled to the left and almost came off the road, but we finally made it. Hoover was one helluva driver. After the show we were sitting on the curb outside the venue, getting our heads around the drive back to Kent, when Ray Davies himself walked right past. He dropped a towel, bent over to pick it up and saw me sitting there. Eye contact. That was the only memorable thing that happened during the winter term.
Spring arrived. I was by then an old hand at going downtown, wandering from bar to bar, finding pot and watching Terry’s band, 15-60-75, and the James Gang. I’d moved out of Leebrick Hall as soon as the winter term ended, and got a room in a house on Depeyster Street, two streets from Water Street.
I was eighteen and enjoying my life, but I had to figure out a way to get out of going to school altogether. My wage from Poots’ Snack Shop, where I made ice-cream sundaes and deep-fried donut holes, wouldn’t cover independent living. Anyway, I was about to get fired from Poots. A good-looking guy from Akron, Bob Smith, would circle the pop stand on his sportster, nod to me to jump on and I’d sneak out for a spin. My boss caught me dismounting and gave me the chop. Slave driver!
I didn’t have a boyfriend and was pretty backward in that department—still a virgin but not too bothered about it. It did occur to me that maybe I wasn’t normal. That worried me a little. I had no way of knowing and wasn’t sure what being normal was anyway. I’d never even seen a naked guy. I suspected that that in itself wasn’t normal. But I was happy with my relationship with guys on records, in bands.
—
We were proud that KSU was a recognized “antiwar” university like Berkeley in California. There was a group of political students on campus, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who were radicals. I didn’t know much about it, but I wanted to be a radical. I knew I was against Vietnam, like everybody else.
One night, on acid, we encountered some Vietnam vets in a bar and got into a conversation, unintelligible to them and regrettable to us. It was grim. Nobody showed the vets coming back from ’Nam any respect. We thought they shouldn’t have gone in the first place.
The war was a terrible blight on our certainty that we were making the world a better place—more conscious, more inclusive, more free. With the war raging, our optimism just spelled “more bullshit.” We were completely helpless to stop it. What could we do? The real problem was that none of us understood why we were actually in Vietnam. No one seemed to be able to offer a clear explanation. The spread of communism was the reason given. So, if the commies got Vietnam, they were coming for us next? Seemed a little abstract to us pot-smoking peaceniks.
The draft system was devised in such a way that the offspring of the affluent would never have to go to war. It was the one thing we didn’t argue with. Are you kidding? Would any self-respecting hippie agree with the idea of conscription? Absolutely not. Like the Amish, hippies maintained a stance of unconditional pacifism. The only song I remember that addressed this omission was “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. (A song I dug out many years later and passed on to Paul McGuinness, who managed me for two weeks, to pass along to his main band, U2, to cover.)
Other campuses voiced dissent. Right on! And the radio was spilling over with antiwar songs like Barry McGuire’s hit “Eve of Destruction,” which noted that communism wasn’t as much our problem as racism was. But what could we do about the war in Kent, Ohio?
FRIDAY NIGHT, MAY 1
Our charming president, Richard Nixon, who my parents, as far as I was concerned, had single-handedly put in the White House, was reported to have sent troops into Cambodia. It was a red rag to a bull, to us weekend revelers.
What a liar Nixon was! He said he wouldn’t do that!
We had to show support for our side. As usual, the street was packed with crazies on Friday night, so there was no shortage of manpower, and we were, to a man, off our faces as we rolled garbage cans into the middle of Water Street and set the contents on fire. It made for quite a display, what with the smoke and flames shooting up. If anyone dared try to drive through our blockade, they’d get their windows smashed out. Someone tried; it felt good. Smashing the windows out of a car is a great feeling.
Flag burning was also a popular form of protest, and I admit that we didn’t realize how privileged we were to live in a country where protest was allowed. We just assumed life was basically fair. After all, we’d grown up watching Lassie. Plus, there were a hundred thousand of us spread all across the country, so we had that safety-in-numbers sense-of-security thing. We felt impervious to danger.
We saw sickening images daily on television: Vietnamese families decimated, machine-gunned and napalmed—their homes burnt to the ground.
Fatuous slogans like “Give Peace a Chance” further frustrated things by giving the bogus impression that we were doing something about it. But rhetoric rang hollow as, indeed, rhetoric always does. Again, never mind intentions, what were the facts? We idolized the Beatles, but if they couldn’t figure it out, who could? Talking about peace and love was airy-fairy while people were getting their limbs blown off. There was a lot of posturing in the name of protest, but like an art installation what did it mean? How much more thought-provoking could things get? Where was the solution?
We were confused, pissed off and had to be careful not to see the news while on acid.
SATURDAY, MAY 2
Saturday morning rolled round to the news that a curfew had been imposed on the city of Kent. You weren’t to leave your house after 10:00 p.m. unless you lived on campus, where the curfew was extended to 11:00.
Guess where everybody who lived off campus went that night? Correct. We were going to crash in someone’s dorm room to take advantage of the extra hour. We wanted to listen to music and party as usual. And we were all fired up by our spectacle of a protest the night before.
The ROTC—Resident Officers’ Training Corps—was a very unpopular presence on campus. Anything “military” was unwelcome, and its headquarters was in one of the old wooden buildings where a lot of the art classes were held. Obviously it had to go.
The campus was crammed with off-site visitors such as me, so a party atmosphere was in full effect. Every dorm room blasted music out: Hendrix; the Beatles; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Led Zeppelin; Steppenwolf; Richie Havens; Jefferson Airplane. The grassy common was like a festival site. Then the real party began.
As it got
dark, an A-team of longhairs charged down the hill, hurling railroad flares through the windows of the wooden ROTC building. Old and rickety, it went up in flames within minutes, filling the sky with bright orange plumes—just the ticket for a thousand stoned students. All of our faces were lit up by the enormous bonfire, and people were dancing and cheering and waving bandannas in total jubilation.
What we’d failed to note was that the National Guard were stationed just a few miles up the road in Ravenna where they’d been called in because of a truckers’ strike.
The crowd was raging with riot in our hearts, but in the distinct manner of a student party—a party with the flame-engulfed ROTC building as the centerpiece. Everybody was dazzled watching the greatest light show ever, but the party was about to end.
Seemingly out of nowhere, National Guard jeeps appeared, racing across the common while teargas canisters exploded all around. Within moments, the campus itself actually looked like an on-the-spot report from Vietnam. Everyone was running and shouting to get away from the ROTC building as it burned out of control, with the fleet of army jeeps moving in.
Fire engines bounded across the common. The firefighters did their best to quench the flames, but the building was already a goner. Students pulled the fire hoses out of the fire trucks, causing the water to shoot and spray everywhere except on the building.
Then there was the stampede. Everyone was panicking, trying to flee the teargas. Some used shirts dunked in puddles to cover their faces from the stinging, sticky gas, but there was nowhere to run because the common was enclosed by a chain-link fence. We were trapped. And when a few thousand panicking, freaked-out people running as fast as they could hit that fence, it was potential carnage.
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 7