Memories of

DROP CITY

The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love

A Memoir

by John Curl



Part 1: CURLY'S EXPERIMENT

Part 2: THE ROAD TO DROP CITY

Part 3: THE SUMMER BEFORE LOVE

Part 4: BACK TO DROP CITY

Part 5: GETTING THE WORD OUT

Part 6: THE JOY FESTIVAL

Part 7: LIVING THE REVOLUTION

Part 8: THE COUNTERCULTURE

 © Copyright 2008 by John Curl. All rights reserved.

PART 1

Prologue
Drop City was a legend and, at the same time, a real place.

I lived at Drop City for three years, participating in its precipitous rise and the events that followed. Many years later, I decided that it was time to tell the true story, but what did I really remember of events so long ago, of the world beyond the frames of the old snapshots and fading newspaper articles, beyond the moments of passion? I couldn’t decide whether the story could best be told as history or fiction. The truth seemed to keep crossing the line between the two. As they say, fiction writers tell lies in order to tell truths that can’t be told any other way.  Back in the Sixties, sometimes it felt that the daily events we were living were also happening on another, almost mythical, level. Still, reality is messy and sprawling, while fiction transforms it into neat plots. Drop City involved a lot of people, so there wasn’t just one, but many stories. Memories can be deceptive, and we constantly rewrite our life stories. I didn’t want to hurt the people I loved and still love, or hurt myself, by writing the truth, but truth is the bottom line, and that is what I had to write, whether I wrote it as a novel or a memoir.

Begun in remote southern Colorado in 1965 by three young artists as a social experiment and art colony, it quickly became the first “hippie” commune, a crucible of the time, a hotspot of creative ferment and radical ideas, a countercultural crossroads stop for numerous seekers traversing America on their way to some better future. Drop City provided some of the earliest form and image to some of the ideas bubbling out of the ferment of related movements for social change of the Sixties. Drop City won R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Award for 1966. The media portrayed it as a center of the drug culture, but Drop City is where I and a lot of others stopped taking drugs. Because something important happened there, the name Drop City still rings in our deep cultural memory over forty years later.

To understand America today you’ve got to look back at the Sixties, the watershed of forces that changed the second half of the twentieth century, and to comprehend the Sixties you have to look at the counterculture. I don’t mean the rock bands, but the culture of the communes, collectives, and cooperatives, which sprang up in an infinite variety everywhere young people gathered. That was what the term “counterculture” meant: not a musical style, but the collective culture that groups of young people were creating all over the country. The rock groups of course were an important part of that, but just one niche of something much bigger. Those were years in which millions of young people, and some older people too, really believed in what we called the Revolution. Large numbers of young people were rejecting the status quo of American society and turning to each other; in so doing we were seizing the power to recreate our world. That was the energy at the heart of the counterculture, and of Drop City.

The Sixties were a time the likes of which we haven’t seen since. If I hadn’t lived through it as a young person, I might have difficulty now believing that such a time had ever existed. The America of the 1950s had hit a dead end at full speed, but out of that terrible crash appeared something new and totally unexpected. There was a sudden excitement in the air. Something new seemed suddenly possible, simply because so many young people were banding together it make it happen. At Drop City we took on “Dropper names,” new identities for the roles that we thought we were playing. It seemed that literally anything was possible, both in our personal lives and in changing the world. We really thought that a great leap in human consciousness was about to reshape the planet. The Revolution was inevitable, and we were being swept along on its cusp. All power to the imagination.

So these are my memories of Drop City.

 



CHAPTER 1

CURLY'S EXPERIMENT





“Get off my case, will you?” Kugo complained to his wife Frinki, while their two baby girls laughed and jumped on the mattress on the floor of the chilly apartment.

A couple of wooden chairs and a small table were the only other furniture. I sat on the cold radiator by the window. The open oven door was radiating a little heat.

Frinki turned to me. “He always thinks everybody’s on his case. But he hasn’t even got a case. He traded it for a couple hits of windowpane.” Her deep green eyes were surrounded by a million freckles and a mop of frizzy red hair flying every which way. If she weren’t always so sarcastic, I thought, she would be beautiful. Windowpane was a kind of LSD.

This was the summer of 1965, a few weeks after the first photos came back from the moon and President LBJ began sending massive numbers of troops to Viet Nam. My friend Kugo and I were both living on the Lower East Side.

It was a strange summer. At first New York passed through a heat wave, the air so stagnant and humid you could hardly breathe. But now it was unseasonably cold.

“Don’t pay any attention to her.” Kugo began to roll a joint. He had been telling me about friends of his, Curly and Jo, who had just been in town and staying with them. “They do things different out there in Drop City. That’s what Curly says. Everything’s different there. At Drop City you don’t have to work. You can do anything you want. Fuck around all day, get stoned. Everybody’s an artist, whatever. They got interviewed by some poet who writes for the Other. He’s going to do an article.”

The Other  was an underground newspaper.

“How do they survive?”

“They just do. Go live there a while and see for yourself.”

“Anybody can just go live there?”

“Anybody. Drop City is Utopia.”

“Don’t believe it,” Frinki said.

“I don’t believe it. Nobody believes in Utopia any more. At least not in Colorado.”

“Okay, it isn’t Utopia,” Kugo said. “Utopia’s got rules. Drop City doesn’t have any rules.”

“Up is down and down is up. Isn’t that right, Kugo? And the tooth fairy leaves Thai sticks under everybody’s pillow.”

Their apartment was on the top floor of an old tenement on Second Street, a planned slum for poor immigrants when it was built a hundred years before. It was a tiny place, just one room with a stub wall about four feet high separating the bedroom from the kitchen. The bedroom side was only a little bigger than the bed, and the kitchen had a lion’s-paw bath tub squeezed into one corner. The toilet was down the hall, shared with the other tenants on the floor.

Kugo ran his fingers through his thick, pitch-black hair. “What’s with you, Frinki? On the rag?”

“Kugo, enough of this bullshit. Go out and get a fucking job.”

“Don’t start this in front of my friend, will you?” He turned to me. “I’m sorry, man.”

“I understand.”

“Curly could explain Drop City to you better. You’d really like each other. I’m sorry you missed them.”

“They were only here for a few days?”

“Just left this morning. Back to Drop City. I called you to come meet them, but your phone was turned off.”

“I got it turned back on.”

Frinki began to lace her boots.

“Where you going?” Kugo asked.

“Where do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“To the Welfare office, to try to get some fucking foodstamps to feed your daughters.”

I smelled a fight coming and stood. “Got to run. Catch you later.”

Kugo lit the joint. “Sit down.”

A voice came through the door. “The Fates have decreed our return.”

“It’s Jo and Curly!” Frinki exclaimed.

A chubby face hidden behind wrap-around sunglasses and framed by a wild halo of kinky, black hair burst into the room, laughing, talking a mile a minute, followed by a pageboy blonde wrapped in a huge coat, with even features, smooth skin and a bit of a peasant build. Curly set a shopping bag on the table and began telling about a blown radiator. Frinki took their coats morosely and threw them in the closet. Curly’s manner had Kugo and me in stitches. Frinki stared at the shopping bag. Jo kept rolling her eyes and saying, “It didn’t happen like that,” but Curly just went on with the story. I could tell from their accents that Curly and Jo were from Brooklyn or thereabouts.

Finally Curly stopped talking long enough for Kugo to introduce us.

“How’s your morning sickness?” Frinki asked Jo.

“Not bad today. By the way, we brought dinner.”

Frinki immediately perked up, plunged into the shopping bag and began emptying its contents onto the table. Curly pulled out a plastic bag of sinsemilla and began rolling jays.

When our stomachs were warmed by the feast and our minds by the marijuana, Curly let out a loud belch.

“Don’t be gross,” Jo said.

He acted shocked. “Oh, excuse me, I forgot I was back in America. In really civilized places a good belch lets your hostess know you appreciated dinner.”

Frinki bared her teeth. “Thank you.”

“That just demonstrates my point.”

“Which point?” Kugo asked.

“This society likes to pretend it’s the apex of civilization, right? They’re so civilized they get grossed out if you belch. And at the same time, everybody acts like a mad dog.”

“Not everybody,” Jo put in.

“Okay, not everybody, at least not all the time. But on the whole this society is based on the principle of the dog fight.”

“We’ve all got the dog in us,” I said. “It’s human nature.”

“Right. You can’t change human nature. But we’re not just dogs. That’s only the lowest side of our nature. We’ve got better stuff in us too. The question is: how much is this society bringing out the dog in people? Is this a plague that has got everybody diseased? Can it be cured? Is it just that the people on top act like mad dogs, so everybody else has to as well? Does that gear this whole society to bringing out the dog in people, so if you don’t act like one, you get pushed to the bottom of the heap, which brings out the dog in you anyway, and you start biting and clawing your way up?”

“Dogs don’t have claws.” Jo corrected.

Curly ignored her. “Or is the dog so ingrained in us that people will always turn the world into a dog fight?”

“I don’t know. What’s your answer?” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know either. At least not yet.”

Kugo growled and lit another joint. “All I want is a full belly and some good reefer.”

“Because you’re a highly advanced soul. Not everybody is at your level yet. And won’t be if the people who run this society have their way. They see people like you as a threat.”

“To what?”

“This is the richest country in the world, there’d be plenty for everybody, if only they’d share it. But this society falsifies scarcity to get people like us to clean the toilets of the world for a few dimes. In order to perpetuate the dog fight. It glorifies the dog fight into a universal truth. It claims the best of all things come out of the dog fight. The dog fight is its pride and joy.”

“So what’s the alternative? Nobody’s going to go for socialism in America.” Kugo cut him short.

“I’m not talking about the government running everything. I’m talking about Drop City. That’s the great experiment of Drop City: Is there an alternative? Given decent circumstances, will people act decently? On their own, not if they’re forced to. That’s what we’re trying to do at Drop City. Start all over again from scratch. Everything fair and everybody equal. No rules or expectations. The only thing we have to agree about is that nobody has the right to exploit anybody else. Work when you want to; relax when you want to; find your own balance. Then we let Drop City grow, give it room to take its own shape, like a big extended family, like a living organism.”

Kugo laughed. “And you’re king, right?”

“In a place where everybody can take a good belch, everybody’s king.”

Curly went on to say there was only one other person living in Drop City so far, a painter named Clard, but other people came down on weekends to help with construction, and some of them were talking about moving there.

“You’re living in domes?” I asked. “Why domes?”

“Domes are advanced. All these rectangles make our heads into boxes. Living in a dome opens your fucking mind. No corners to hide in. Round like the sky. Living in a dome’s like always sleeping under the stars. Frees up your inner harmonies. You wake up every morning feeling like a new man. Helps you let go of your ego and attachments, all the junk that’s hanging you up and holding you back.”

“You ever hear of Bucky Fuller?” Kugo asked.

“Just vaguely.”

“The man who invented the triangle,” Curly said. “Domes are the simplest structure to build. The cheapest. A twenty-five-foot diameter dome costs less than two hundred smackeroos. Do more with less. You put little flaps along the sides and a skylight on top and, bingo, you got free, built-in air conditioning.”

“Kugo said Drop City was kind of like an artist colony. What about people who aren’t artists?”

“You don’t got to be an artist to live at Drop City. But at Drop City everybody’s an artist. When you don’t got to do all the shit that they force everybody to do,” Curly said, “what’s left but art? Painting, poetry, music. In the future—in the Drop City future—everybody’s going to be an artist.”

Deep into the night, while Jo, Frinki, and the kids were asleep on the mattress, Kugo, Curly, and I went on talking, laughing, and smoking.

Curly handed me a Drop City wallet card with a picture of a domelike structure and an address in Colorado. “Next time you’re tripping across country, stop by and take a load off your mind. Stay as long as you want.”



* * *



Drop City sounded like an escape hatch to a drowning man. I wasn’t making it in New York. I’d gone through a series of menial jobs and loathed them all. I was really at loose ends. I’d dropped out of college because I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do with a degree. I just didn’t fit into this society, except as an outsider.

It was always like that. The neighborhood I grew up in was divided into separate Irish and Jewish enclaves. Ethnically my family was both, but we didn’t practice either religion, so we were not socially part of either group. My mom’s parents were Romanian Jews, and my dad’s were Irish Catholic and English Protestant. On top of that Grampa Sam called himself a “nature worshiper.”  Luckily I wasn’t the only outsider around.

I had a job sweeping a burlesque theater before the midnight show, four nights a week. Ernesto had gotten me the job, and we did it together until he quit. It was old-time burlesque, starring a once famous, fan-dancing stripper in her sixties. She looked pretty good actually, under the colored lights from a distance. They paid me in cash every night, a few quick dollars. I liked being around the menagerie, but they fired me for being late, unreliable, and incompetent.

I found another job at Pleasant Trucking Company, where I worked out on a dock routing packages onto a conveyor belt. It was hard, fast, dirty, freezing in winter, and very low paying. There was a tannery nearby, and the sickening stench of rotting horse flesh constantly blew into my face. As I worked I would turn away, take a deep gasp of the air behind me, which somehow I convinced myself was cleaner, and try to hold my breath as long as I could. Luckily they only let me work half-time, to keep me out of the union.

One night after work while I was hurrying past the tannery holding my breath, three guys jumped out of nowhere, backed me against a car, stuck a long blade in my face and demanded my wallet.

“I don’t carry a wallet.”

That made the guy with the knife awfully mad. I emptied my pockets and offered him a couple of dollars and a handful of change. He mumbled something about my mother and smashed me in the side of the head. As they stalked away, I felt the side of my head for squirting blood, but there was none.  He had turned the knife and hit me with the butt. My skull ached for days, but I was thankful to him.

Then there were the burglars. They always came in through the fire escape. Why even bother for my few worthless possessions? After a point I stopped nailing plywood over the window, and I didn’t replace my stuff. They must have taken that as a challenge, because they kept breaking in even when there was nothing to steal. Then I saw a young man walking across the street wearing my sweater. I just looked at him as he walked by. I didn’t even feel like killing him.

I grew up in The City, in a working class family. Dad was a postman, a letter carrier. Grandpa a garment worker, a shop steward for his union. I loved New York in a lot of ways, but as hard as I tried, there seemed to be no place for me there. I was either incapable or unwilling, or both, to do what was required for success.

My main resource in New York had been my group of friends, mostly people in the same boat. Besides sharing a deep alienation and anger, we also pooled many of our resources and helped each other survive.

I desperately wanted someplace that I could call home. It took me a long time to realize that I really didn’t have a home in New York any more.

A lot of friends went cross country and reported that living was easier on the West Coast, looser, that you didn’t have to squander all your energy barely surviving there. I’d been planning for a long time to go check it out, as soon as I scraped together some money, but that never seemed to happen. I had a few vague contacts in San Francisco. But I knew nobody between the coasts. Now I got the idea of stopping off in Drop City on my way west.

Although I grew up primarily in Washington Heights, my grandparents also had a little house in the country, across the Hudson river in New Jersey, where mom was raised. Grandpa Sam had arrived in Ellis island at the age of fourteen in 1903, from rural Romania, where Jews were kept in shtetls and forbidden to own land. His American dream was to become a landed peasant, or, in American lingo, a farmer. Forced into a sweatshop in the Manhattan garment district, he saved his pennies, and around 1920 he and grandma bought seven acres in New Jersey. But the farm failed in the Great Depression, and they were forced back into the city and he into the sweatshop. They kept the house, but it became a place where eventually they planned to retire. Anyway, we spent summers there, and I got to play with farm kids and know country living. I wondered if I could survive out there any better than Grampa. Since I was such a loser in New York, Drop City might let me see if I could make it any better in the country.


* * *


Drop City reminded me of an idea some friends and I had discussed a few years earlier, in the Fall of 1962, when the threat of imminent atomic war over missiles in Cuba had us all panicked. Most of us were students at New York City College.

We gathered at Otis’ apartment the night of the Cuban missile crisis: my buddy Ernesto, an aficionado of radical poetry and social revolution; our girlfriends Odessa and Mandy (this was before I met Patt); and Giovanni. We all knew each other from college, except for Giovanni, who was Otis’ offagain onagain lover. It was with this group that I first smoked marijuana. Pot made me paranoid the first few times, but soon it just affected me as a mood enhancer, a lot better than wine or beer.

Ernesto and the people he hung with were mostly Marxists. They’d always talk about how rotten capitalism was and “Come the revolution this, come the revolution that.” They called themselves communists, but they meant a communism in some distant future, which would liberate humanity, not communism as it was actually practiced anywhere. Present communism didn’t count because the revolution had been deformed, temporarily, by the never-ending struggle against capitalism.

To me it didn’t add up. Something had gone terribly wrong in their revolution. But it wasn’t just communism that failed. All systems had failed. Capitalism itself was once a radical ideology struggling against an aristocratic system, proposing a utopian vision of social justice. Either that promise failed too or it was a false promise. Betraying their ideals, both capitalism and communism wound up funneling the wealth of the world into the hands of small elites, just like the old aristocracy. The whole world seemed built on broken dreams, and the lives around me seemed crushed by false promises.

Still, the concept of the revolution was very compelling. It didn’t matter if everything in the past had failed. Humanity still needed to be liberated. People were oppressed by society, by each other, and, worst of all, by themselves. I too wanted and needed to liberate myself.

This was at the height of the Cold War, when the world seemed divided into two irreconcilable camps. I’d grown up during the McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, when the United States was a pretty frightening place to a kid in a progressive political family. Almost all dissent was stifled. History as taught at school was mostly how the US, the fortress of freedom, had saved the world from fascism. Who could disagree? If you didn’t have an approved opinion, you kept it to yourself or got in trouble. My mom, a New Deal Democrat, warned me, “Don’t repeat anything outside that you hear at home.” Mom told me that because Dad could lose his job as a mailman and Grandpa could go to jail. Grandpa was a communist. That’s what he called himself. He wasn’t a Party member, as far as I know, just a “sympathizer” or “fellow traveler,” which are names they used for people like Grandpa in those days. He was a union man and thought that the government and bosses were in cahoots against the working man, and had used World War II as a cover to destroy the union movement. Mom was pretty left too, though her hero was Gandhi. One of my earliest memories was walking with Mom to one of her favorite stores, but finding pickets in front, she led me away, explaining why we couldn’t shop there and saying, “Never cross a picket line.” That’s what I grew up with.

By the time I was a teenager the witch hunts were over, but everybody still kept leftist opinions to themselves. At college in the early Sixties, people were once more broaching the ideas of revolution.

To my circle of college friends the Cuban Revolution represented the possibility of a breakthrough, a possibility beyond the Cold War, a small country struggling to find an independent way of life, a third way. It seemed like a peasant revolt searching for its own indigenous form of social justice.

Then I met Mandy. She held that the Revolution had failed because it had things backward: personal liberation had to come before social revolution, not vice versa. To achieve this and become fully alive, you needed to overcome your sexual hangups. The Sexual Revolution would replace the nuclear family with an extended or tribal family, which would free everybody from oppressive demands like fidelity. The key to human liberation was good orgasms.

I went around in circles about all this.

 Otis was the first black guy I ever became close with. Ernesto and I used to go down to his apartment, listen to music, get stoned and drunk with him and his friends. Otis was brassy and dynamic; his apartment had a continual party atmosphere. They lived in the same old tenement on Second Street near Avenue C. Otis lived in the basement apartment, Ernesto and Odessa lived on the top floor. I lived a few blocks away. Otis sang and played piano in a nightclub style; Giovanni was a wiry classical pianist with spidery fingers. Their common playing, though in antithetical styles, seemed to bind them together. I’d already become good friends with both of them when Otis told me he was gay. I had not even quite figured out what gay people do in bed. Pretty dumb, I guess. The attraction of gay sex was a mystery to me, but was the yearning for closeness and the desire to melt into another entity really different?

We were pretty depressed the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis and stayed up the whole night talking, preparing to die in a nuclear holocaust before dawn. If we were still alive in the morning, if the world was still here, we would go away to some isolated place and somehow live there quietly and peacefully. We all felt like giving up on this society. It was too violent and corrupt, too involved with domination and competition. We would pool our meager resources, find some land somewhere, share what we had and help each other survive. Otis, who was Creole, said he was thinking of moving back to his aunt’s land in rural Louisiana, and we could all join him. If there was a nuclear catastrophe and we were lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to be survivors, we would get the opportunity to rebuild the world, or what was left of it, on new foundations of cooperation and sharing instead of competition and greed. We talked about what we would bring, what writing, art, music, science of this civilization was worth preserving. I had my doubts that our little group, mixed both racially and in sexual orientation, could restart the world in the Louisiana bayous, but I kept my doubts to myself.

The morning of course dawned and we were still alive. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been resolved. We could scarcely believe the world was still here and we had the rest of our lives to live. What a gift! How precious! We wouldn’t waste a minute. We walked the waking streets. How beautiful the world looked, how holy!

That night changed my life. After that I felt like I was living on borrowed time. I retained the notion that I would probably die young, so I resolved to live to the fullest. What more was there to fear after the near end of the world?

I spent the next few months staying up all night and sleeping during the day. I stopped going to school or work. Eventually I slid back into the old routines, just to survive, yet the idea of escaping continued to simmer in my mind. It was just a matter of how and when.

Even though Mandy and I were pals, the kind of soulmates who would stay up all night and talk about existentialism, we were never really good lovers. Maybe we were too much alike. Refusing to accept that as our fate, she decided we just needed to rev up our energy systems, and to do that she began sitting in an orgone box. I tried it a few times, but all I got was bored.

After Mandy and I broke up, I decided to join the Sexual Revolution, and ran around trying to have good orgasms with as many beautiful women as I could. It did rev up my energy system, but didn’t turn out to be a magic bullet. I started to worry that I was incapable of really feeling love.

Then along came psychedelics, and suddenly everybody was talking about a new revolution through a mass expansion in consciousness.


* * *



 






Chapter 2

THE DRAFT BOARD



A few days after I met Curly and Jo I received a notice from the Draft Board ordering me to report. I was floored, although I should have expected it, since I’d lost my student deferment six months earlier when I dropped out of school.

In March 1965 the first large number of US combat troops were sent to Viet Nam, followed by the first anti-war demonstrations and draft card burnings. By July, there were 125,000 US soldiers there.

“I’m not going. No way,” I said.

I was in Ernesto’s pad, a few houses down from Kugo’s. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon. Ernesto had just woken up. He’d been called and rejected a month before. “Do you have flat feet?” he asked.

“No.”

“How’s your eyesight?”

“Not bad.”

“Any other disabilities?” We’d met at college, shared a sense of futility, dropping out and back in and then out of school again at about the same time.

“Kind of. You know I’m not good at taking orders,” I said. “It makes me angry. I have contempt for authority. They don’t want people like me in the Army.”

“They love people like you. They’ll give you to a drill sergeant who’ll grind you into dog food. Then they’ll throw you on the front lines and get rid of you.” Ernesto felt that the US government was beyond redemption. “I always thought you were a pacifist. Aren’t you?”

“Well, kind of.”

“Can you get a letter from a minister saying you’re a pacifist?”

“I don’t know any ministers.”

“You might be able to get pacifist credentials from the underground, but that would take some time.”

“Anyway I’m not really a pacifist. One of my main goals is to get through life without killing anybody, but if we were attacked, I think I’d fight. That would be different. I’d probably even kill somebody if I had to. But not for this Viet Nam bullshit. I’m not killing anybody for Rockefeller, and I’m not going to die for LBJ’s political career.”

“Well, you could run back to school and try to get a student deferment again. You could marry a woman with a couple of kids. You could flee to Canada.”

I decided to just ask him outright. “How did you get out?”

“I flunked the physical.”

“Flat feet?”

“No, I did it the hard way.”

“What’s that?”

“I psyched out.”



* * *



I emptied my laundry bag and found some ragged dirty clothes. My elbows stuck out of my shirt, my knees stuck out of my pants, and my toes stuck out of my sneakers. I’d been up all night.

As I walked along the street I practiced being a paranoid catatonic by watching the cracks in the sidewalk. I didn’t look anybody in the eye. The only time I glanced up was to see the street signs.

Guys about my age were converging from every direction and climbing the steps of an official-looking building. This was it.

A van drove up, a few guys jumped out and began handing out leaflets to everybody while one of them yelled into a bullhorn, “Resist the imperialist beast! Refuse to fight an unjust war for world domination. Burn your draft card.” He held up a card, flicked a lighter, then raised the burning card above his head and chanted, “Hell no, we won’t go! Hell no, we won’t go! Hell no, we won’t go!” The leafleters all joined in the chant.

Down the stairs bounded a group of soldiers. In an instant the protester with the bullhorn was down, face pushed into the concrete, the bullhorn bouncing past me. They dragged him up the stairs, screaming, arms behind his back, blood pouring down his face. They rounded up all the leafleters, grabbed all the leaflets they had dropped, and disappeared inside. There was blood on the sidewalk.

I was dumbfounded. I realized I’d forgotten my act. Everybody was stopped, uncertain of what to do. Then a few guys started hesitantly up the steps.

I climbed one step, when somebody called my name. Oh God!

I turned. It was a fat kid I knew in public school. I wanted to melt down the storm drain.

“Where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you since sixth grade!” On his head sat a black leather captain’s hat a couple of sizes too small. He was decked in a black leather shirt unbuttoned to his navel, exposing his few chest hairs, and over his jeans were black leather chaps with a hole in the crotch.

I was shocked by the way he was dressed, but just mumbled, “I don’t hang out in the old neighborhood any more, Dickie.”

He leaned toward me and whispered in a shaky voice, “Do me a favor: if you see any of the guys, don’t tell them you saw me here like this, okay? I don’t really dress like this.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“You’re a pal. I’m just trying to get a 4F. The country is going totally bonkers. They always need a war.”

“I know it.”

“How about you? Are you going into the Army?”

“I don’t know.”

I looked around at the guys walking up the stairs around me. Some were limping, others staggering, some seemed almost blind, some drugged, a few were drooling and rolling their eyes from side to side, some were in rags, a couple of them in drag. I suddenly felt very ordinary.

They herded us all into a big room, sat us down. Dickie was in a chair near me. They gave us a pencil and a form to fill out, with about a hundred questions. I glanced it over. Almost all were innocuous, even silly, questions, but every once in a while they threw in loaded ones about various abnormal psychological symptoms, violence, drugs, homosexuality, masturbation.

I answered yes to all of them.

I know this sounds stupid, but suddenly, above my head, in my mind’s eye, I saw my mother’s face. She’d been dead for several years. She seemed to say, “Baby, why are you doing this? Don’t stigmatize yourself for the rest of your life.”

I was losing it. I found myself erasing all the loaded answers, answering no to everything. Then I stopped again and erased those answers too. I pushed too hard, the paper tore. I didn’t know what to do. My form was a mess. I was in a cold sweat.

A soldier collected all the papers and disappeared with them into another room.

He was gone a long time. Everybody was fidgeting, nobody talking much. Dickie was twitching.

Then the soldier appeared again. “When I call your name, march front and center, and line up facing me.”

He began calling names. One by one guys limped and staggered to the front, until there was a long line of almost everybody. He even called Dickie’s name. Dickie pushed himself up, looking shocked and faint. His leather pants swished as he squeezed past me. Only a few of us were left seated.

“The rest of you, stay where you are until you’re called.” He turned to the line. “Now, follow me! Hup two! Hup two!” He marched the line out of the room.

After a long wait, he returned and called a name. A guy stood who looked like he should be in a hospital. The soldier led him out of the room. After a half hour he called another. It was taking all day.

Finally my name. I was led to a room and seated in front of a balding man in a suit. I crossed my legs tightly, tucked my hands into my arm pits, hugging my chest and staring at the floor.

I could feel him leering at me. “You didn’t fill out your questionnaire properly.”

“What did I do wrong?” I stammered without looking up.

Through the corner of my eye I saw him waving the form at me. “Look at this mess. We want one answer and one answer only. When was the last time you wet your bed?”

I shook my head.

“Do you ever pee all over yourself while you’re sleeping?”

I said nothing.

“Do you ever wake up in a wet bed? What’s your answer?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, glancing back and forth.

“How can you not know?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you ever get depressed?”

I didn’t respond.

“Do you understand what I mean? Severely depressed. So depressed that you don’t want to get up or do anything. Please be cooperative. I’m just trying to help you. Do you consider yourself an angry person? Do you ever get violent? How do you feel about your mother? Do you like women?”

I stared at the floor and shook my head.

“How often do you masturbate? You know, play with yourself? Jerk off? How often do you jerk off? I can see what you wrote here, even though you erased it. You wrote, Once an hour. Is that true? Do you really do that? What do you think about when you do that?”

“No,” I muttered.

He went on and on. “What drugs did you use last night? I can see what you wrote here. To the question, When was the last time you took drugs, you answered, Last night. What did you take? Marijuana? Amphetamine? LSD? Cocaine? Heroin? What drugs did you take last night? I’m getting very frustrated with you. I wish you’d be more cooperative. Do you want to go into the Army?”

“Yes, no.”

“Are you scared?”

I drew my arms tighter around my chest. “I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. I want to help you. When you go to the men’s room, do you pee in the urinal or in a stall? Do you ever look at the penis beside you? Why don’t you answer?”

I shook my head, staring at my socks.

“When was the last time you played with another man’s penis?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Have you ever had a dick in your mouth? Come on, what’s your answer?”

“No,” I stuttered.

There was a long silence. Then he said, “Stand up.”

I hesitated, then stood.

He motioned. “Come over here.”

I walked around his desk. He swiveled in his chair to face me. I didn’t meet his eyes.

“Drop your pants. I need to examine you.”

I hesitantly did what he said.

“The underwear too.”

I pushed them down.

I felt his hand on my genitals. I froze.

“Now turn around, bend over and spread your cheeks.”

I retreated a few steps. “No.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m the person who can help you.”

For the first time I took a good look at him. His eyes were red and glassy, with big sacks under them, his bald pate shined under a cap of a few long side hairs combed across them, and his fleshy lower lip drooped. His neck bulged over his tight collar and tie. His brown suit was shiny in the knees.

“Don’t worry. No one will bother us. The door is locked. Now turn around, bend over, and spread your cheeks. I need to examine you. This is very routine.”

“No.”

“You’re going to get yourself into a lot of trouble if you don’t be cooperative.”

“No.”

“You are truly pathetic. Do you want a 4F?”

“I want to be left alone.”

“Get down on your knees.”

I didn’t move. We glared at each other.

Finally he said, “Do you find me repulsive?”

I said nothing.

He went on, “You have no idea how many dicks you’ll have up your butt in Viet Nam.”

“Take me in the Army,” I finally said. “Give me a gun. It won’t be Viet Cong I’ll be shooting.”

We glowered at each other. Then he turned, sat at his desk, scribbled some notes, and, without looking up, muttered, “That’s all. You can go.”

Out on the street, the exhaustion hit me. I felt drained, utterly humiliated. I tried to pull myself together. I kept hearing the voice of my mother saying, “He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day.” She was big on maxims.

I walked all the way home, staggered to bed and passed out.



* * *



 
Chapter 3

THE NIGHT BEFORE



“Frinki and the girls have moved out. Gone to Drop City.” The room was even more bare; the toys were gone. Kugo was hurting. “She got tired of dealing with all the shit here. We’ve been on each other’s case too much. I might go out to Drop City too. This planet’s moving too fast for me. I need a break.”

Over the next few months I periodically asked Kugo what was happening out at Drop City. He and Frinki seemed to communicate pretty regularly. He often said he missed her and the girls. He sank in and out of depression about it. One day he’d say she was coming back, then the next day he’d say she wasn’t coming back but he might go out there. Meanwhile he always seemed to have a new girlfriend, and never more money than he could make dealing a little dope.

It sounded like they were doing well at Drop City, but I couldn’t really tell much. Kugo wasn’t very communicative or straightforward about personal things. According to Frinki, a third man had joined Drop City, bringing their population up to seven, including the two kids; eight if you counted Jo’s fetus.

Kugo didn’t know, or wouldn’t tell me if he did, about their sexual arrangements. I never asked directly. It was a little touchy.

I wrote Curly, Jo, and Frinki a letter, and Curly wrote back, encouraging me to come. I lined up a ride through a newspaper, sharing driving and expenses to Denver. After visiting Drop City I was to meet my girlfriend Patt in San Francisco, where we planned to spend the summer together, if we could get along. She had been to San Francisco the summer before with a group called Students for Social Justice, although she was more into music than politics.

I’d met Patt through Frinki; they’d lived in the same dorm at a small rural college.

Our relationship was rocky and shaky. We found each other attractive, but also annoying. Sometimes the same characteristic would be both. Like the way any little thing distracted her. One minute she would be walking next to me, then the next minute she’d disappear and I’d find her looking at a store window or petting a dog. We’d waste a lot of time bickering, then come back together in bursts of passion.



* * *



As the time approached for my leaving for Drop City and the Coast, the Viet Nam war kept getting hotter. This was the spring of 1966.

My gear was packed. I was to meet my ride at six AM the next morning.

“If this is our last night together for a while,” Patt said, “let’s go do something wonderful.”

“Otis is having a party. It should be a blast. People are getting together at Ernesto’s too.”

She took my hand. “Will you miss me?”

I should have said yes, but said, “How will I know until I’m gone?”

“If you cared about me you’d know.”

“I know it’ll be good for us to get a little space, give us perspective on how we feel about each other.”

“Don’t you know how you feel?”

“Things might look different when we’re two thousand miles apart.”

“So you think that you might not miss me.”

“How can I know how I’ll feel until I feel it?”

“What if you meet some nice girl when you’re alone?”

“What if you meet some nice guy?”

“What if?”

“You do what feels right for you and I’ll do what feels right for me.”

“So you want us both to do anything we feel like while we’re not together?”

“If we’re meant to be together, we’ll get back together again.”

“So when we meet in San Francisco maybe we’ll still be a couple and maybe we won’t.”

“It’ll be a great experiment.”

“Relationships are not experiments. People have to work at a relationship.”

“If it’s too much work, why bother?”

“If you only want fun, your relationships aren’t going to last very long.”

“Longevity isn’t everything.”

“Okay. Let’s leave it loose. If that’s the way you want it.”

We walked down Second Street to Ernesto’s. The streets were teeming. Puerto Rican music blared out of windows, cars honked, people shouted in a thick cacophony. I had all my gear with me.

Graffiti covered the lobby walls. We climbed the creaking stairs to the top floor. Through Ernesto’s door, I could hear singing:



“Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?”


A couple dozen people were squeezed into the room, including Kugo and his girlfriend Cori. About half the people were singing while Odessa strummed her guitar. The air was heavy with dope smoke, the table replete with food and wine. Ernesto passed me a joint. I poured Patt and myself some chianti. Odessa set her guitar down.

“Have you met my friend Jake?” Ernesto said to me. “He just got back from a tour in ‘Nam.”

There was a sudden lull in conversation, so everybody heard him. It felt like a shroud dropped over the room.

“Now don’t everybody get weird,” Jake said. “I’m not a babykiller.” I could see blue tattoos at the edges of his cowboy shirt.

“Anybody who’s against the war should refuse to go,” Odessa said. She was always forthright.

“Everybody deals with it in their own way. You’ve got to understand, friends, that not everybody who goes to ‘Nam supports the war. There are lots of the guys over there who are just as against the war as anybody back here. They just want to do their tour and come home.”

“That’s only going to prolong the war. We need to end it.”

“Your student demonstrations are not going to end it. Even if you shut down all the universities, that won’t end it.”

“Then what will?”

“The enlisted guy. He’s out there right now refusing to fight, because he knows there’s nothing in ‘Nam to fight for. That’s who’s going to end it. Lots of GIs act to stop it every day, each in their own way. I seen it. Do you know what fragging is? It ain’t pretty. But it’s part of what’s going to end the war.” He pulled a little bag out of his shirt pocket. “And here’s something else that’s going to help end it, direct from Saigon.” He dropped several Thai sticks onto the table, beautiful marijuana buds sewn onto sticks. He rolled them into huge joints, which he lit and passed around.

I heard a buzzing. Sweat rolled from the top of my head slowly down my body. By the time it reached my feet I was flying. My own voice seemed very far away, my mouth filled with cotton. I was sitting on the floor, but didn’t remember how I got there.

“I feel like dancing,” Odessa said.

Ernesto stood. “Does everybody know Otis, in the basement apartment? He’s having a party tonight too. There’s room to dance down there. Odessa and I are going down to dance. Anybody who feels like it can join us. It’s okay to stay here too. The door will be open.”

About half of the people funneled out of the apartment.

“That’s better,” Kugo said, digging a piece of French bread into dip. “Now we can hear ourselves think.”

“What did that guy mean when he said that fucking is going to end the war?” Cori asked.

“Sounds right to me,” Kugo said.

“He said fragging, not fucking,” I interjected. “That’s when you throw a grenade at your sergeant instead of at the Viet Cong.”

“Do they really do that?”

“That’s bullshit,” Kugo mumbled with his mouth full. “It’s all bullshit. Except for fucking and dope.”

“And rock and roll,” Cori said. She turned to Patt. “I broke up with Bob.” Cori’s long willowy fingers were always moving.

“That’s too bad.”

“He wanted his girlfriends but didn’t like it if I did it too. He threatened to kill Kugo.”

“Don’t talk about that,” Kugo snapped.

“Besides, he didn’t satisfy me. Did you ever fuck him?”

Patt gasped. “Bob? Of course not.”

“He’s such a liar. He pretends he’s fucked every girl I know, to try to get me jealous. I don’t know why I get involved with these clueless jerks.”

“Cori,” Kugo cut in. “Mind your own damn business, will you? You’ve been rattling on about this guy all night. You’re getting on my nerves.”

Patt cast me a look as if to say, You believe me, don’t you? I wasn’t sure whether I did or not. At times she hadn’t been totally honest with me, nor I with her. I didn’t want to push the issue, as this was our last night together. I was also concerned that Cori would let out that she and I had had sex. It had happened a few months before, at a time when Patt and I had kind of broken up. We just had sex a few times. I wondered whether Kugo knew. Cori said he wouldn’t care, but I knew he probably would.

Kugo turned to me “When’s your ride?”

“Six AM tomorrow morning. I’m staying up all night.”

“Are you going to Drop City too?” Cori asked Patt.

“No. Just to San Francisco. We’re meeting there in three weeks.”

Cori grasped my arm with her long, polished nails. “One of my oldest girlfriends was just at Drop City. She said it’s great. Her name is Marigold. She’s a painter. She lives in Boulder, but she has friends near Drop City. You’ll probably see her. Give her a hug for me.”

Kugo held out a fist. “Here’s a going-away present.” He opened his fingers, revealing something wrapped in a napkin. “Don’t say I never gave you nothing.”

Two sugar cubes.

Patt motioned me over to the window. “Look, you can see the party at Otis’.” The courtyard below was filled with people. What did Kugo give you?”

“Acid. Want to drop?”

“You’re not serious. Not on our last night.”

“That’s a good reason to do it.”

“Please.”

“You should try it at least once.”

“I have enough trouble keeping my life in order without that.”

“I’ve learned a lot from it.”

“Like how to destroy your brain?”

“Like, everything is more connected than I thought before. And it’s all inside your head and not inside your head at the same time. And everything is very...precious.”

“You don’t have to take LSD to learn that. A girl I knew in school, a brilliant girl, told me that she understood almost everything from taking mescaline, but the one main thing she didn’t understand yet was death. Then the next thing I knew she walked out a window... Let’s go dance.”

Down the stairs, through the lobby then into the basement. Voices and music throbbed through the door. A blast of smoke hit me in the face. It was packed. Familiar faces were dancing wildly. Others spilled out through the open back door into the yard.

We made our way to a table strewn with wine and beer, selected a bottle.

Otis danced over, wearing a druggy smile. “Hey, Patt, looking good, girl.” He turned to me. “Love your trip, Baby. Give my kisses to the Coast.”

A pretty young man slid over and leaned against Otis. Giovanni was right behind him. “Otis, we’ve got to talk.”

“Save your breath for that little queen of yours. I’m partying.”

“I told you, he doesn’t mean anything to me.”

The pretty young man slipped one hand up Otis’ shirt. Otis smirked at Giovanni. “I think I’m in love!”

“Don’t be such a drama bitch.”

The two of them danced away, leaving Giovanni fuming. “I don’t have to take this.”

Just then Ernesto pulled me to one side. “I’ve applied to medical school.”

“Congratulations.”

“I still don’t know if it’s right for me. I might not want to spend my life in that world.”

We got into a long conversation. Through the corner of my eye I noticed Patt across the room, talking with Bob. I glanced at them occasionally as we talked. I wondered if Patt was confronting him with what Cori had said. There seemed something oddly cozy between them, which I’d never particularly noticed before.

At an opportune moment I excused myself. Patt and Bob were gone.

Otis and Giovanni were over in one corner, talking heatedly. A huge pile of curly silver fir was huddled against the far wall behind them, Otis’ borzoi, Bubbles.

I wound my way through the packed room, found Patt and Bob in another corner.

“I need to speak with you,” I said.

“What about?”

Bob grunted a greeting at me and stood. “See you later.” He slipped away.

“Is there something between you?” I whispered.

“Of course not. Don’t get jealous.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“Do you want to dance?”

“I want to talk.”

“You never want to talk. Let’s dance. We came down here to dance.”

“No.”

Two hands with long, polished nails covered my eyes. “Guess who?”

No one had a voice like Cori. “I give up.”

She turned me around.

“I love this song! Dance with me!” Cori pulled me to the middle of the floor, wedging us between dancers. I kept looking around for Patt, but didn’t see her anywhere. I kept hoping the song would be over, but it went on and on. On the other hand Cori was sexy and I was enjoying myself. I picked up a bottle of beer and gulped it as I danced.

Suddenly I saw Patt next to me, dancing with Bob. She smiled at me. She was playing some stupid game. I still had the beer in my hand. Before I knew what I was doing, I had poured some beer on her head.

Patt looked shocked, then angry. She picked up a glass of red wine from a table, threw the wine at me, turned and rushed off.

I stood there dripping, then followed her to the bathroom, but there was a line.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I apologize.”

She glared at me, then hurried away again. I caught up with her in the backyard.

“Are you happy now?” she said. “We’re both humiliated.”

“I apologize. I wish I could go back and undo it.”

“You’re out of control.”

“You threw wine at me too.”

“You’ve ruined my blouse. I’m going home.”

“Let’s go up to Ernesto’s and rinse it out. You can borrow one of his shirts.”

Back upstairs his apartment was empty; everyone was down at Otis’.

I pulled a couple of shirts out of the closet. “Can you forgive me?”

“We certainly elicit strong reactions in each other.”

“Too strong.”

Ernesto’s shirt fit her like an overcoat. She knelt at the bathtub, began scrubbing at the blouse.

I knelt alongside her. I remembered the acid cubes that Kugo had given me, pulled them out of my pocket. “I think I’m going to trip. How about you? Let’s trip together.”

She wrung out the blouse “Don’t totally ruin the evening.”

“It won’t ruin it.” I popped a cube into my mouth. As soon as I felt the sugar melting on my tongue, I realized I was being stupid.

She hung the blouse over the tub. “How will you ever make your ride in the morning?”

“I just will. Let’s go back down to the party.”

She bit her cheek. “Have you ever had sex with anybody on LSD?”

“Do you want the truth?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Now you have to.”

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever imagined,” I said.

“When we’re having sex, do you ever think that we could be making a baby?” She asked as if out of nowhere.

Sirens and flashing red lights bounced around my head. “I don’t usually think about it like that. Why do you ask?”

“Is the possibility of a baby sexy to you or does it turn you off?”

“Can’t we talk about something else?”

“To me the idea of a baby is sexy. A baby as a possibility.”

“Assuming it didn’t take all our worst features.” I was trying to make a joke. Her face began to glow, blue flames shot out of her head. I blurted, “You’re a goddess.”

“You’re stoned.”

“You’re a goddess. And I’m a god. You’re Eve. I’m Adam and you’re Eve. We’re all goddesses and gods. We’re all Adam and Eve. I knew that a long time ago, but forgot it.”

“Adam and Eve aren’t a god and goddess.”

“If you took the other hit, you’d know what I mean. We could share this.”

“I’m very sensitive to drugs.”

I fished the other cube out of my pants pocket and held it out to her. “Take it or don’t take it. It’s up to you.”

She picked it up with two fingers and laid it beside the pillow.

“Do you love me?”

“Of course.”

“You’re on acid. Tomorrow you won’t even remember what you said.”

“I will.”

“Then tell me you’ll love me tomorrow too.”

“How can I know that? We might be dead tomorrow. This might be the last day of our lives.”

“If this is the last day of our lives, tell me you’ll love me always, you’ll love me forever. Even if you don’t know if you mean it.”

“If this is the last day of our lives, I’ll love you always, I’ll love you forever.”

She said, “If this is the last day of our lives, then I love you too.”

She picked up the LSD sugar cube. “Should I take it?”

“It would make this night special for the rest of our lives.”

“And if I don’t?”

“It will be special anyway.”

She put the cube in her mouth and we sank into a deep kiss. An endless tropical sunset flowed between our bodies. I lost track of time.

“Somebody just came in.”

“Don’t let us disturb you.” It was Kugo.

I realized we were both naked. Patt pulled the sheet up around her.

“I think I left my purse in here.” Cori said.

“Did you drop that acid?” Kugo’s face broke down into shifting geometric shapes.

“It’s good stuff,” I said.

“You too?” Kugo asked Patt. “Did you drop too?”

“I think I’m getting sick,” she groaned.

“Ride with it. It’ll pass.”

“There’s my purse,” said Cori.

“I don’t feel well,” Patt said.

“This stuff is very smooth,” Kugo said. “I guarantee it.”

“I think I’m going to pass out. I need to be held. Somebody hold me.”

Cori put her arms around her. “Just a little anxiety. You’ll be all right.”

I was floating a few inches from the floor, confused. I couldn’t remember how to walk. I slipped and landed on the floor at the foot of the bed. A school of tropical fish swam by. I watched them for a long time. Then I got to my knees.

Lying on the bed entwined were Patt, Kugo, and Cori, a naked tangle of legs and bellies, tongues and breasts. I felt sick, shut my eyes. A man in a mask stepped out of a dark alley, plunged a knife into my chest, reached in with his hand, plucked out my beating heart, and held it, spurting blood, above his head.

“Quiet! The neighbors are going to call the police!” Kugo was shaking me.

I realized I was yelling. I bit my tongue.

Patt was sitting at the kitchen table with Cori, who was feeding her a piece of bread.

“I feel very cold. I’m going to vomit,” Patt said.

“Let’s go to the sink.” Cori helped her over and moved some dishes out of the way.

The door opened and Ernesto stood in the doorway. Odessa peered over his shoulder into the room.

“Is this really happening?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” Kugo said, “everything’s cool.”

Odessa took charge and bundled Patt up. I paced around crazed. Somewhere in there I got my clothes back on. Kugo and Cori were gone; I didn’t remember them leaving. Ernesto and Odessa kept feeding us tea and saying reassuring things. Patt didn’t want to talk to me.

At five in the morning I said, “Should I cancel my trip?”

“Not for me.”

“Then I’ll have to leave. I’ll take you home.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll be all right. I’m not ready to go yet.”

“She’ll be okay,” Ernesto said. “We’ll take care of her.”

“Call me from Drop City,” she said.

“I don’t think they have a phone. But I’ll call from somewhere. See you in San Francisco,” I said.

Patt gave me a cold peck. “Maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s the way everything is between us, isn’t it?”

I picked up my backpack and sleeping bag. “I guess it is.” I walked out, started downstairs, but stopped at the landing. I felt confused, overwhelmed. I wanted to rush back, but stopped myself.

I started walking west, to the subway stop where I was supposed to meet my ride.

Someone called my name from behind. It was Giovanni. I didn’t feel much like company.

“What are you doing out?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was depressed. Otis and I got into a terrible fight.”

“I got into a fight with Patt too.”

We walked through Thompkins Square Park, commiserating. Giovanni was a true innocent, with few worldly attachments; he had been a divinity student. He was also a fine classical pianist, but, to his sorrow, never quite good enough to have much of a career as a soloist.

A ragged old man fell off a bench onto the ground, shuddering, foaming at the mouth, his eyes rolled back.

“He’s having a fit,” Giovanni said. “We’re got to stick something in his mouth so he doesn’t swallow his tongue.”

I threw down my backpack, grabbed a couple of old popsicle sticks lying on the ground. Giovanni wedged his clenched jaws apart, and I stuck the sticks in.

“I’ll go for help.” Giovanni ran off.

The man kept trying to spit the sticks out; I felt helpless. A few guys were standing above us. One of them knelt and began rummaging through the man’s pockets.

“What are you doing?”

“Mind your own business.”

I looked around the group that had gathered. Swimming eyes, ravaged skin, ragged clothes, stench of urine and wine. One of them said, “Spare change?”

“Your friend’s dying! Aren’t you concerned?”

“He ain’t our friend,” one of them muttered.

“I got to get to my cousin’s in Brooklyn. I need a couple bucks. I know you got it.”

I reached into my pocket, pulled out all the money I had in the world. “Take it!” I threw it in high the air. They scrambled after it, fighting among themselves as Giovanni and a policeman appeared.

I picked up my gear, feeling very weary.

“We better hurry,” Giovanni said. “You’ll miss your ride.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t go. I threw away all my money. I can’t go without a dime in my pocket.”

“How much do you need?”

“I don’t even care anymore.”

“How much?”

“Enough to eat. I paid for my ride in advance.”

He slipped off a shoe and pulled a wad out of his sock.

“I carry this for emergencies.”

It was a hundred-dollar bill.

I met my ride, threw my gear into the trunk, waved goodbye to Giovanni. As we crossed the George Washington bridge to Jersey, it started to drizzle. Droplets trickled down the fogged pane. I wiped the window with my palm and looked back at the cloudbank hovering over the city.



* * *




Next: Part 2: THE ROAD TO DROP CITY

Return to Red Coral

 


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