Miriam

Everyone knows what happened on the stage with the Jefferson Airplane, Santana and so on: it is history. The evening ended after the Stones came out with Sympathy for the Devil… Mick Jagger strutted his usual stuff on the stage. “But what’s troubling you is the nature of my game… hoooh-hoo-hoooooh!” After the music was over the crowd started milling around in a daze. I had been tripping all day on the several hits of free acid I’d dropped by then and trying hard to understand what had happened. Camp fires here and there lit up little groups huddled around them. The medical Tripping Tent was full to capacity. I had hung out there for shelter, waiting for dawn. Some came in reporting a campfire overrun by a car driven frantically by someone paranoid; tripping, thinking the Hells Angels were after him. Three people were killed in that one. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I was in one of those here and now spaces.

Dawn finally arrived and the light of day revealed a scene after a battle. Sleeping bags abandoned scattered throughout. Baggies with sandwiches… pot… some film cans with known and unknown pills were there too. I found a bag with a fresh ham n’ cheese sandwich and ate it. I found a bag with some joints already rolled and lit one up. I saw a young looking girl in shorts with strong thighs, thick calves, wearing heavy wool socks and hiking boots doing the same… eating a sandwich. I approached her with the joint, “Have a hit.”

“I don’t smoke pot,” she answered in a non-judgmental tone that commanded respect.

“Oh, really, what is your name?” my curiosity was piqued.

“Miriam.”

She wore thick… very thick, coke-bottle eye-glasses but she reached down and picked up a joint by my feet. “You want it?”

“Sure, how did you see that?” I scratched my head. “I was looking right at it and didn’t see it.”

“You mean my eye-sight?” She adjusted her glasses on her perky little nose.

Despite her powerful legs she was a cute and pixie looking little thing, “How did you get here?” I ventured, thinking maybe she had a ride back to somewhere.

“I hitched.”

“Alone?” I probed. She picked up another joint I hadn’t seen and handed it to me.

“I was with some people from Sacramento but we went separate ways… how about you?”

“Yeah, I came in from San Francisco but my partner is nowhere… I lost contact with him by the time the music started.”

She was not only scavenging for sandwiches but she was putting trash in the cardboard barrels positioned everywhere around the area. I started doing so too. Dan and Linda doing the same further down the hill. By this time the stage and amp towers had been broken down and the portapotties taken away but the tiny airflow trailer the acts changed in was still there looking lonesome next to the race track. They waved and I followed their lead picking up trash but scavenging baggies for whatever was in them too.

News people showed up with a camera crew and interrupted us with a lot of questions. Dan and Linda refused to give their names and asked not to be filmed. Miriam and I followed suit. The woman reporter wanted to know why we didn’t want to be in the news. Were we wanted by the police or something like that? Dan responded, “Can you think of any other reason we might want anonymity?”

She looked at Miriam, “Are you a run-away?”

Miriam looked at her as though she been asked the most stupid question on earth… “Like, um, maybe we escaped from an insane asylum?”

The reporter wanted to know why we were picking up the trash. I wanted to tell her that we were scavenging sandwiches and dope but I let Dan do the talking: “Because the trash is here.”

“Were you hired and how long will it take?”

At this point the owner of the race track, Dick Carter, showed up. He fielded all the questions and told the news crew we were volunteers helping out. I never saw the evening news but I had seen enough public interest stories to know that the evening news would have a bit about how wonderful it is that the dirty hippies, who’d made this mess, were also helping to clean it up. Dick Carter talked for some time with the reporters and told them all about the damages to the fences and so on hoping that people would join these volunteers to help out. He offered us the race track tower as a place to live until the work was done after the news gang left. The Berkeley Barb reported that some such politically connected group, The Environmental Action Committee, was in charge of the volunteer action. There was no sign of them. A dozen or so like us, picking up trash and going through all the vials and baggies looking for drugs, were all that we saw. Dan and Linda moved into the abandoned trailer left and unpaid for by Sam Cutler or Bill Graham… whoever. Miriam and I moved into the pillow shack. The rest (a dozen or so in flux) stayed in the tower.

It was rumored that Bill Graham had offered a benefit concert at Fillmore West that next Saturday for the clean-up effort; inviting all of the clean-up committee free entry… oh boy. I was so sick of the whole rock-star bit by that time. I just knew it would never happen or the Environmental Action Committee would glom on it. A group of us piled in a pick-up and went all the way into the city anyway. No-one there knew anything at all about Mr. Graham’s offer. Our motley crew stood outside waiting for someone to let us in… Miriam and I hitched a ride back to the pillow shack where we made love, ate, slept, made love, and slept for about a month. I made up for all the lost time with four years of little or no poontang in the USN. Meanwhile, the hippy-press bad mouthed Dick Carter as a capitalist opportunist and everyone soon forgot about the concert and its aftermath.

Woodstock West!

While sitting there, I struck up a conversation with a young couple next to our spot. Dan and Linda had been part of the overnight set-up scene but escaped the reveille beatings. They had the sense, or intuition, to move back from the stage area before the disastrous call from the stage. This meeting was another coincidence that I found amusing and fortuitous because it turned out that this couple came from my home town, Spokane Washington. Linda was petite and pretty in a gauzy, see-through, dress displaying her little apples of breasts and that dark triangle above her thighs that I found very attractive. I was disappointed to find that she and Dan were on their honeymoon. They had just gotten married a few days before at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Finding she was likely off limits, I was still willing to feign interest as she explained her Buddhist beliefs. I’d heard none of it except for the part where she explained that she had been on a bad acid trip in which she had stripped naked in front of a full length mirror, examined her body, and accepted it as beautiful.

I understood because, as the acid came on, I too loved her body and was pleasantly surprised that this talk about spirituality so far had nothing to do with the usual crap about angels and demons. There she was almost nude in her gauzy dress talking about her body and Zen Buddhism to a strange horny man right in front of her newly-wed husband who just sat there listening knowingly. I was mesmerized.

She went on, “I stood there naked and followed the contours of my flesh. I saw my body as something beautiful reaching its prime but already going towards decay and death.”

I tried to lighten it up a bit by obviously complimenting her on her form, “I don’t see any decay going on.”

She didn’t respond and continued, “I saw all that and stood there for what seemed an eternity and watched myself…, approved myself… and embraced myself.”

God, she was driving me nuts. My hormones were screaming and only abated because the crowd began pressing in. A hot air balloon hissed and drifted above, the music began and we had to stand. It was one of those elbow to elbow things… at one point the ground became muddy under my feet. I’d lost track of Randy and the sleeping bags we’d spread out.  We were down-hill from the dozen or so portapotties: that were entirely inadequate for the crowd they were to service. Perhaps there had been plans to service them but there was no way for the septic pump trucks to cut through the crowd. I looked around and saw that it was a sea of humanity completely filling that entire natural bowl with nowhere, no way, was there a route out of there to take a leak if one needed to. Besides the steady stream of urine running from each portapotty, I saw people pissing where they stood: women simply hiked up their skirts. At one point during that day, while I was still standing near Dan and Linda, a couple of school-busses were driven down into the crowd by the Hells Angels. There was nowhere, and no way, to get out of the path of the busses but that didn’t stop the buses. They simply plowed into the crowd. It was some kind of wonder that nobody was seriously injured by that Hell’s Angels display of humanity. This was only some of the stuff I witnessed and some more that I didn’t. It was said that women were being pulled out of the crowd onto the busses and raped but I hadn’t seen that happen. It was bad enough what I did see. The hot air balloon hissed and climbed and hovered over the scene …this Woodstock West crap was really getting old.

Well, everyone knows what happened on the stage with the Jefferson Airplane, Santana and so on: it is history. The evening ended after the Stones came out with Sympathy for the Devil… Mick Jagger strutted his usual stuff on the stage. “But what’s troubling you is the nature of my game… hoooh… hoo… hooo-ooh!” After the music was over the crowd started milling around in a daze. I had been tripping all day on the several hits of free acid I’d dropped by then and trying hard to understand what had happened. Camp fires here and there lit up little groups huddled around them. The medical Tripping Tent was full to capacity. I had hung out there for shelter, waiting for dawn. Some came in reporting a campfire overrun by a car driven frantically by someone paranoid; tripping, thinking the Hells Angels were after him. Three people were killed in that one. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I was in one of those here and now spaces.

Dawn finally arrived and the light of day revealed a scene after a battle. Sleeping bags abandoned scattered throughout. Baggies with sandwiches… pot… some film cans with known and unknown pills were there too. I found a bag with a fresh ham n’ cheese sandwich and ate it. I found a bag with some joints already rolled and lit one up. I saw a young looking girl in shorts with strong thighs, thick calves, wearing heavy wool socks and hiking boots doing the same… eating a sandwich. I approached her with the joint, “Have a hit.”

“I don’t smoke pot,” she answered in a non-judgmental tone that commanded respect.

“Oh, really, what is your name?” my curiosity was piqued.

“Miriam.”

She wore thick… very thick, coke-bottle eye-glasses but she reached down and picked up a joint by my feet. “You want it?”

“Sure, how did you see that?” I scratched my head. “I was looking right at it and didn’t see it.”

“You mean my eye-sight?” She adjusted her glasses on her perky little nose.

Despite her powerful legs she was a cute and pixie looking little thing, “How did you get here?” I ventured, thinking maybe she had a ride back to somewhere.

“I hitched.”

“Alone?” I probed. She picked up another joint I hadn’t seen and handed it to me.

“I was with some people from Sacramento but we went separate ways… how about you?”

“Yeah, I came in from San Francisco but my partner is nowhere… I lost contact with him by the time the music started.”

She was not only scavenging for sandwiches but she was putting trash in the cardboard barrels positioned everywhere around the area. I started doing so too. Dan and Linda doing the same further down the hill. By this time the stage and amp towers had been broken down and the portapotties taken away but the tiny airflow trailer the acts changed in was still there looking lonesome next to the race track. They waved and I followed their lead picking up trash but scavenging baggies for whatever was in them too.

News people showed up with a camera crew and interrupted us with a lot of questions. Dan and Linda refused to give their names and asked not to be filmed. Miriam and I followed suit. The woman reporter wanted to know why we didn’t want to be in the news. Were we wanted by the police or something like that? Dan responded, “Can you think of any other reason we might want anonymity?”

She looked at Miriam, “Are you a run-away?”

Miriam looked at her as though she been asked the most stupid question on earth… “Like, um, maybe we escaped from an insane asylum?”

The reporter wanted to know why we were picking up the trash. I wanted to tell her that we were scavenging sandwiches and dope but I let Dan do the talking: “Because the trash is here.”

“Were you hired and how long will it take?”

At this point the owner of the race track, Dick Carter, showed up. He fielded all the questions and told the news crew we were volunteers helping out. I never saw the evening news but I had seen enough public interest stories to know that the evening news would have a bit about how wonderful it is that the dirty hippies, who’d made this mess, were also helping to clean it up. Dick Carter talked for some time with the reporters and told them all about the damages to the fences and so on hoping that people would join these volunteers to help out. He offered us the race track tower as a place to live until the work was done after the news gang left. The Berkeley Barb reported that some such politically connected group, The Environmental Action Committee, was in charge of the volunteer action. There was no sign of them. A dozen or so like us, picking up trash and going through all the vials and baggies looking for drugs, were all that we saw. Dan and Linda moved into the abandoned trailer left and unpaid for by Sam Cutler or Bill Graham… whoever. Miriam and I moved into the pillow shack. The rest (a dozen or so in flux) stayed in the tower.

It was rumored that Bill Graham had offered a benefit concert at Fillmore West that next Saturday for the clean-up effort; inviting all of the clean-up committee free entry… oh boy. I was so sick of the whole rock-star bit by that time. I just knew it would never happen or the Environmental Action Committee would glom on it. A group of us piled in a pick-up and went all the way into the city anyway. No-one there knew anything at all about Mr. Graham’s offer. Our motley crew stood outside waiting for someone to let us in… Miriam and I hitched a ride back to the pillow shack where we made love, ate, slept, made love, and slept for about a month. I made up for all the lost time with four years of little or no poontang in the USN. Meanwhile, the hippy-press bad mouthed Dick Carter as a capitalist opportunist and everyone soon forgot about the concert and its aftermath.

Altamont Speedway

A buzz was going around town. Every day I hawked my bundle of “underground” papers (The Berkeley Barb, The Berkeley Tribe, The Good Times, The Oracle) for a quarter each. A Sexual Freedom League pamphlet also sold great at a buck each because of the graphic erotic illustration on its cover; similar to the one’s later made popular in Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. I stood nightly at the corner where Broadway, Grant and Columbus crossed each other with a mad display of “Topless” bars like Big Al’s. My Mecca, the City Lights bookstore, at the top and other end of China Town from the St Charles Hotel was down a half block across the alley from the Vesuvius bar. The buzz that was going around town was that the Rolling Stones were going to give a free concert like they did in Hyde Park when Brian Jones died. It was being touted as “Woodstock West”. All the West Coast, and some East Coast, bands would be playing; Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills and Nash … and so on. 

Rumors were thick. Some thought it would be out at Sears Point. Others had hoped it would be in Golden Gate Park. The freeways were clogged with traffic headed one-way towards where everyone thought it was going to be held at every change of venue. Finally, last minute, the spot was fixed at Altamont Speedway.

And so it happened that, as I was vending my “underground” papers at Broadway and Grant, I agreed with an acquaintance, Randy … a six foot-five, long-scraggly-haired, bearded fellow vender with a cleft palette and breath so foul that it could stop a freight train… to head out to Altamont Speedway by way of the thumb. It was madness at every freeway entrance. Every hippie in San Francisco was cued-up and decked-out with thumbs out in the freak styles of the late Haight Ashbury. By late 1969 the Haight had become a sewer of runaways, junkies, and their constant consorts, those who preyed on them. The rest took up on the street fashion of the day. It was hippie-chic but chic took having a job and working for a living to pull it off. The lifestyle was the other part of chic that just plain didn’t make sense. I’d actually witnessed one hipster park his Corvette down on Union Street to panhandle on Broadway to be part of “the scene”. I was sure of my own lies but these lies helped to betray my only hope for a generation… the generation that brought Woodstock to the world’s attention. What was it about these kinds of lies that was to insure Altamont was to crush that hope? …

… Randy’s lanky form towered over me. I’m sure we resembled a hippy version of Mutt and Jeff as we put out our thumbs at the entrance to the freeway at the bottom of Broadway. There were several others at the entrance going the same way. The site of the concert was settled the day before it was to start. Everyone was headed towards the hills beyond Oakland to a site between Livermore and Tracy: A free concert just like Woodstock, only better because this was California and we know California is the birthplace of psychedelia.

            We jumped into the bed of a pick-up among a half a dozen others. Things went smoothly enough until the truck passed Livermore and traffic started to back up. Cars were at first parked along side of the freeway (smart ones, who knew the area, took the old Altamont Pass Rd. from Livermore). We neared the speedway, cars were abandoned on the freeway and all traffic came to a halt. Hiking the last two or three miles Randy and I arrived at the top of the hill overlooking the mad scene below as the sun was setting. The crimson sky was highlighted by fires started in cardboard trash barrels burning. Those not being burned were used as improvised conga drums.

The conga rhythms pounded out anticipation that made way only for the calls of hawkers; “Acid! I have acid! Orange Sunshine! Barrel Acid! Two bucks a hit!” Dealers shouted through the din as we passed, calling out and competing with calls for, “Pot…. Maarrriiiijuana! … I got some Mary Jane for ya… a nickel a lid!”

Randy saw me craning my neck to the calls and pointed out, “Don’t buy anything; it’ll all be free by tomorrow.”

Down in the bowl of a valley was centered the stage between twin sentinels of amp towers. A chain link fence separated the new arrivals from the lucky ones (or unlucky ones as morning would tell) who had been there all day helping to set up the equipment and stage. There was also handful of Hells Angels down there too: it was rumored that they were serving as security for the event. Smoke from camp fires dotting the area set up an eerie blue haze contrasting the crimson sky. It was a hellish vision equal to any painting by Hieronymus Bosch, not unlike siege-fires burning… foreboding events to come the next day. No one tried to cross the chain-link fence into that arena as the night drew on until first morning light. “Pleased to meet you… Hope you guessed my name!”

Rumors made it around saying the Grateful Dead dropped out of the performance… that the Rolling Stones were backing out too. Others said that The Airplane and Santana were already there and that the rumors were just that… rumors making room for more. I didn’t care… at last I was where it was happening. I’d joined the Navy and left San Francisco before the acid-tripping-hippy deal got going and when I returned after four years San Francisco had turned into just one more dirty city: Alioto’s city where you had to watch where you stepped for the dog shit on the sidewalks. The free love of the Haight Ashbury was gone; if it’d ever been there in the first place. I was beginning to think, and would soon find out, that all of this talk of peace, love and understanding was just that…. talk.

First thing in the morning an announcement (some say it was Sam Cutler, manager of the Stones) came from the stage area. The folks who were on the ground in front of the stage in their sleeping bags were kindly asked to wake up and make room for the mob waiting to get in. Most had been up all night setting up the amps and the equipment usually trusted to roadies. I watched in horror from outside the chain-link fence on the hill above as Hells Angels went from bag to bag with cue sticks beating the crap out of any and all late risers. They came out of their bags with hands out-stretched, fending off the relentless thumps of the cues on their helpless bodies. The announcer’s pleas for peace met deaf ears from the Angels and the beatings only subsided when the last malingerer had escaped. As the chain-link fence gates were opened I was swept along by the rush of the crown down into the bowl of the arena next to the race track. Randy and I made it past the stage area where Hells Angels warned people away and we settled on a spot halfway down between the speaker tower on the right and the stage. Disregarding the earlier melee as a fluke, we spread out our sleeping bags like picnic blankets eagerly awaiting the early beginnings of the concert. I dropped two or three hits of acid.

Chapter One (Continued...)

The candy-striper was there when I came out from the anesthesia. I hadn’t expected her to be anywhere near me after my outburst with the chaplain. My vision was still blurred and a patch of thick gauze covered my left eye but she looked like a bronze angel, “They call me Max, what’s your name?”

“Glenda.”

“I expected something more exotic, like Leilani.” I wasn’t in pain… I wasn’t in anything… I was there and that was all there was to it. She was there too and that counted for something.

“It’s just plain Glenda. How are you feeling?”

“Huh, a little fuzzy…”

“You’re in a better mood than when I last saw you.” She said flatly.

“Thanks to the morphine,” Oh shit, I thought, more mawkish concern. Then, after a pause of more than a few uncomfortable minutes, I spoke through a thick anesthetized tongue, “My mood is cheerful enough… what do you mean?”

“You tore into the chaplain…. He was just trying to be helpful.”

“How is it helpful to tell me I might die?”

“Don’t you think about what will happen to your soul, Max?”

“You tell me what a soul is, Glenda, and I might get concerned about it.”

She turned to walk away and, over her shoulder added, “We’ll talk about it when your mind is clearer and you are in a better mood.”

“My mind is clearer than it will ever be. How am I in a bad mood?”

“It could be better.” She smiled and walked out of sight from my one good eye.

Ward Ten was the orthopedic ward where all the broken bones, shrapnel wounds and amputees went. There were Marines, Army, Navy and an assortment of military dependents and veterans in the ward. The section where I was there was a kid in the bed across from mine, a dependent of a Navy NCO barely sixteen, who suffered some form of deterioration of his bones. Billy’s head was held with pins through a halo attached to titanium rods that continued down to reinforce his spine. The Kid (that’s the name we gave him, Billy the Kid) was dying and he knew it. He’d suffered a series of heart failures and each time they wheeled him to the E.R. seemed like it would be his last.  I was intrigued with him because the Kid was always so damned cheerful. Even though he was sixteen Billy looked more like twelve. Still, he joked and goofed off with the best of us and he was considered one of the men in the ward.

…all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.

And now I know that we must lift the sail

And catch the winds of destiny

Wherever they drive my boat.

To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness

But life without meaning is the torture

Of restlessness and vague desire ---

It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

From: Spoon River Anthology

By

Edgar Lee Masters

One night a program came on the TV that the Kid insisted we watch. There were eight beds in our section and the viewing fare was picked by consensus: mostly cop-buddy shows like Hawaii Five-O or Combat reruns. But this particular night everyone ceded and allowed the kid to watch his show; The Spoon River Anthology, from an adaptation of the book of poetry written by Edgar Lee Masters. I wasn’t sure why but I looked forward to the show myself. The theme was somewhat dour as far as I was concerned and I wondered whether it might be too much for the kid. The subject of the anthology was the lives of those buried in the Spoon River graveyard speaking from their graves. After it was over was over Billy asked me; “Do you believe in life after death, Max?”

I adamantly did not believe in any such nonsense but I understood that the Kid was asking because he was preparing to die. Of course, I lied; “Yeh, I guess so. What do you think?”

“I don’t know but I’m gonna find out real soon.” He shrugged.

 “You mean heaven and hell?” our section was quiet… everyone in earshot was listening. “Whatever; just doesn’t make much sense does it?”

“No, but I’m gonna miss my folks and friends if I’m there and know it.”

“Good point,” I was hesitant but, what the hell, the kid would know soon enough, “it does seem a bit morbid when ya think of it.”

“Anything’s better than this.” He gestured at his halo, monitor and oxygen tanks. I didn’t know what to say and the other GI’s in the room had nothing to say either. Finally, the kid spoke. “Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t so bad that I don’t want to live.”

I was thinking, Shit, he hasn’t even had a chance to get laid yet. Next thing I knew I was making things up. I heard myself saying, “Hey, maybe all this will work out for you.” I knew I was lying and I knew the Kid knew it too.

“Yeh, maybe it will work out.”

That would be our last conversation. The alarms on the monitors went off around two a.m. That had happened several times before but, as the Docs and nurses wheeled him out to the E.R.; the finality of it sank in.

The next day at lunch Glenda wheeled in the meal cart and passed out the trays to our glum lot. Usually the battle hardened Grunts and Screaming Eagles would cheer up when a skirt like Glenda walked in the door but there was none of the usual banter.

As she set up my tray she asked about the kid. Of course, she already knew but it was more to break the silence, “Were you awake when it happened?”

“Yeh, we all were. There was a lot of the usual noise.”

“You okay?”

I had been biting my lip and I’d hoped she hadn’t seen it. “Yeh, I’m fine.” A lump the size of a golf ball was lodged in my throat. I didn’t know why but her concern stirred up something deep within me. I wanted to cry but I could not: not here in front of these other men but perhaps… just perhaps, if I were alone with Glenda… far away from the ward… perhaps I could cough up that golf ball and let the dam break. I turned my head into my pillow so she wouldn’t see the tears. Hell, I didn’t even know the Kid. He was just another bed on the ward. A nuisance… with his monitors and alarms! Damn it all to hell. The nation was at war and so was I. I was at war with myself and I was at war with God. What kind of God would make this mess?

“Glenda,” I called out as she was almost to the door, “You still concerned about my soul?”

“Well… er… yes?”

“Don’t be. I don’t have one.”

“I think you do… and a good one at that.” Thankfully she left. I watched her bronze-toned calves under the candy-striped skirt push her stainless-steel cart of trays down to the other end of the ward.

Ah, I thought, I wonder if my back will be able to manage the ole In and Out with a girl like that when I’m out of here.

My mind must have been easy to read because the Jarhead in the bed next to me fended off his grief also by saying, “Yeh, I think I’d like a taste of that too.”

Chapter One: Dry Dock

My Dear Foster-Frame

I was Twenty-two and my Navy enlistment would have been coming to an end in seven months. Laid up in a Foster frame with three vertebrae crushed and fused together by the Docs at Tripler Army General Hospital, I was in dry dock. My boat, the Sculpin SS 191, was also in dry dock at Pearl Harbor Shipyards after a Westpac tour but I wouldn’t be going back to her. My luck had run out over a shuffleboard machine at the Sub-Base EM club. I’d just been busted down to Seaman from Torpedoman 3^rd Class and had been celebrating this misadventure with more than a few drinks.

My luck had run out on that shuffleboard machine but not because I didn’t play well. I knew every warp on the board of that damned thing:  I played good alright… too good for the squids off the Coral Sea. They met me on the way back to the barracks and worked me over real well: crushed my cheekbone and a few ribs. I’d flipped over a retaining wall to get away and discovered too late that it was at least twenty feet to the pavement below.  I remember shouting on the way down: “Oh, shit!” and thinking it is over… this is all I have to show for my life. I hadn’t those thoughts while I was getting the crap beat out of me by the Coral Sea skimmers. I was busy fighting for my hide. Had I known it would come to this I might have given them their money back. But I chose to make an unscripted exit: they took off, perhaps believing the fall must have killed me and that I could be more trouble than the few bucks I’d conned them out of was worth.

I lay there in that Foster frame after the Army surgeons knitted my vertebrae together and waited to be carted off for another surgery to patch my crushed cheekbone. One of the candy-stripers came by and gasped in horror: “My God, what happened to you?”

I didn’t really want to talk… I was a mess. The whole left side of my face was a swollen blob of black and blue bruised flesh. I could see through my one blurry eye that she was young, cute and innocent enough, “Oh, I got jumped by some skimmers.” I made part of that up because I barely remembered the fall and, vaguely, a shuffleboard game.

“Oh no, were they black?” She had such deep brown eyes. Her sympathy was enough to stir me through the fog of morphine and pain. I hated to disappoint her… I couldn’t remember what race the skimmers were at that time either. Racial tensions were high. It was 1969 and Black Power was combined with anti-war sentiments that divided race and rank in every branch of the armed services.

“Naw, they were white.” I watched, with my one good eye, her expression sour.

“That is horrid, to think, they were your own kind!” I could have laughed, had I not been so medicated, because she looked Hawaiian with a good amount of Africa in her Wahini blood… like it would have been better had they been black: And horrid? Nobody used words like that except in old movies.

“Naw, I already told you, they were skimmers.” I was getting annoyed now and hoped she would go away without me having to explain that I’d earned my dolphins as diesel-boat submariner and that a skimmer (any surface ship or crewman) was an entirely different species… Hell, we were practically in a completely different Navy than even Nuke Boats.

“By the way, how long does it usually take to recover from something like this?” I was unaware that candy-stripers were just volunteers and not nurses.

“I don’t know… a few weeks or maybe months?” She must have been in the dark about my crushed vertebrae. She just saw my smashed up face.

I added, “Oh, you do know my back is broken.”

“Oh, Jeeze,” her brow furrowed in deep thought; “how bad?”

“Three vertebrae, T-twelve to L-two: Crushed ‘em.” Oh Jeeze? An Andy Hardy movie at that!

“Oh, Jeeze,” she said it again… knitting her brows, “probably six to nine months.”

Whew, I thought; it is February and my enlistment is up in August… good, I won’t have to go back to the boat… hmmm; counting on my fingers, do nine months extend past my separation date?

Just before I was being prepped for surgery on my crushed cheekbone, a brass oak-leaf Major came into my cyclopean view. I saw, on the Major’s other collar, a brass cross. Oh shit, an Army chaplain. The candy-striper was at the door watching. It was mildly embarrassing that she had to be a witness as the chaplain attempted to do his job. He picked up the clipboard from the foot of my frame, looked at my chart for a name, and slipped right into the topic of his visit.

“Hello, Sean… er, Seaman McKee. Would you like me to pray for you?”

“No Padre… no thanks.” I was kinda playing for the candy-striper now but I meant it.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk or anything?” the Padre was not used to being shunned, “A short prayer helps before surgery.”

“Helps what, Father? I don’t need help.”

“I have seen many healthy young men think the same as you, and sometimes…”

I’d heard this ministerial tone before, “I’ll take my chances.”

“… And sometimes they don’t make it.”

“Well, Padre, I don’t believe in your uniform or your God. Let me go to the grave on that!” On that I saw the girl in the candy-stripes turn away. The Major hesitated a minute, as though he were going to say something, but turned to go pray with someone more receptive to his calling.

I came out of the surgery alive in spite of my curses. It might have been worse. You never know when you go in for surgery… especially in an Army Hospital at a time when battles like Hill 937 were sending planeloads of 187^th Infantry and 101^st Airborne to Ward Ten in far worse straits than I was in. A little meat-grinder in South East Asia called Hamburger Hill was chewing up soldiers, young men like me, in ways that made me feel like my problems were insignificant.

Dedication: A Time Ago & Then

A Time Ago and Then is dedicated to all the lost souls, returning veterans of the South East Asian Conflict and runaways I encountered during the waning years of the late sixties and the decompression of the early seventies after the Altamont Speedway fiasco. It speaks of the deterioration of social institutions that occurred at the height of the Viet Nam War as good number of this generation were drafted into the services; took to the streets; experimented with communal life-styles; adventured with drugs; explored sexual and moral ambivalence of those times; and swam through an undercurrent of confusion of the era.

I wrote this book in the year 2010, as I passed by homeless panhandlers on our city’s streets; heard the stories of drug addicts and alcoholics of all ages and the children of the children of my generation; prayed for the men and women in uniform returning from the War in Afghanistan and Iraq; because of all these my heart ached for the need to tell this tale.

I dedicate it to those who attempted, and often failed, to overcome the confusion. Some came out on the other side of it while others sank into its quicksand and were fatally mired in it. We are your grandfathers and grandmothers now and time is slipping away for me to tell the story of this adventure via Max, a flawed character: whose excursions from light to dark and back again can and ought to be judged harshly. He would agree with our judgment and, in the end, he doesn’t seek exoneration or give excuses for his excesses and for escaping the legal consequences of his greatest crime. His story is not an isolated one and it draws from hundreds of similar stories… of struggle and redemption. I needed to tell it and I told it, no holds barred, as honestly as I could.

I also dedicate this book to my daughter, Alanna, her dear mother, Carolyn, and her mother, Lucyna (author of Between Two Evils, who inspired me to keep on writing past the first hundred pages); my partner, Bonnie, whose love and patience at being a writer’s widow is appreciated beyond all explanation. But most of all the prayers of my mother, Eileen, and father, George, and sisters who never gave up on me through all those dark years.

May 23, 2012

George B. Couper II