A Time Ago... Chapter 3. San Francisco & Altamont Speedway (pt 1)

I was back in San Francisco… the City. As far as I was concerned there’s no other city. It was the first major metropolis I’d lived in or been to other than Seattle. I’d left my home in Eastern Washington to ride a Greyhound to San Francisco as a young and naïve boy and I came back after four-years overseas presumably a man. I sat in my room by the window looking across the street at the Saint Charles Hotel. The light filtered through the pulled shades over shut windows. I halfway regretted no longer being a “juicer” and, for a minute, I wanted to take a pull from a bottle of Jack Daniels. I hadn’t had a drink since my first acid trip back in Waikiki and had no desire to start that cycle once more. I rolled a fat doobie from my dwindling stash instead. The Plaza wasn’t exactly what I’d remembered or imagined it to be. There were no longer any bell hops or doormen. The night clerk showed me to the elevator. I was on my own getting to the room. Still, it was the Plaza Hotel and I would not have felt right about staying anywhere else my first night.

Later, I moved into the Sutter Hotel on Sutter near Polk. I paid my rent two months in advance and, every other day or so, I took a bus to the Haight to get a few bundles of “underground” papers to sell on the street. I brought my bundles back to Broadway, Columbus and Grant, at night. I spent my days walking around the city alone. Sometimes I would walk all the way through Golden Gate Park to the ocean and take a bus back as I did before joining the Navy four years before.

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 ones made popular in Alex Comfort’s, The Joy of Sex. I stood nightly at the corner where Broadway, Grant and Columbus crossed each other adorned 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 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, and 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 witnessed things like one hipster that parked his Corvette down on Union Street to panhandle on Broadway just 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?

Speaking of lies: I had been sober for a few months (if one doesn’t count marijuana and an assortment of hallucinogenic drugs) before I caught myself in a lie once more. I’d been selling my rags and idly chatting with my fellow vender, Randy (who rented a room upstairs above Big Al’s at the Dante Hotel). The subject of cross-country running came up. It turned out that Randy had been cross-country running since high school and I had had a brief turn at it myself. However, what I caught myself doing was embellishing my record, thinking no one would know the difference. I did so to such a degree that I was, by my telling, second only to Olympic runner Gerry Lindgren (who was the first high school runner under the four-minute mile back in the day). I knew I was lying but thought that I would never be caught in the lie. However, I hadn’t counted on this friggin-hippy being such a fanatic about running. He had ‘cross-country-running magazines’ going back to the early fifties with every record and their times; second best as well as third and fourth up to that date.

Damn, I thought, what is this? What kind of coincidence would put me in front of a goddamned authority on cross-country running while I tell my first lie since sitting cross-legged on the beach in Waikiki and promising to never lie again? Furthermore: I had to ask myself, what in the hell did I think I was going to gain by this exaggeration? It just didn’t make sense to me but I suspected that oath I’d made on the beach was being honored by a mysterious power beyond my understanding. That suspicion guaranteed that I would hold back on dishonesty as long as I could… if only I could stop lying to myself.

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-dozen others. Things went smoothly enough until the truck passed Livermore and traffic started to back up. Cars were at first parked alongside 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.

AT&T Chapter 2(pt) Max Honorable Discharge

After muster, everyone is assigned light duties and so on but no one said anything to me about my uniform or lack of one until the Bos’n called me to the side as everyone was breaking muster, “McGee. Put on your dungarees and report to the work detail at the Supply Depot. You can do that much for me, okay?”

What the heck. It was strange enough that he’d asked politely and I had nothing to do. A half-dozen of us were taken in the back of a pick-up to the supply depot where a couple of Private First Class Marines met us with scowls. It was as though we were on an extra duty detail. I noticed the Private in charge of the detail had only a few ribbons; the regular National Defense and stuff you get out of boot camp.

He called out our names from his clip board. Some he sent to the warehouse and others to light duty elsewhere. He came to my name, seeing that my dungaree shirt had the deep blue shadow of a petty officer patch that had been removed, and barked an order, “McGee, grab a broom and start sweeping the grid.”

I’m not one to disobey an order but, hell, a couple of pushes on the broom woke up the pain in my back.

I complained, “Say, there must be a mistake. I just got out of Tripler and am in the Medical Holding Company.”

“Oh, poor baby. You will start sweeping or get written up,” he spat out his contempt for me and everything Navy.

A porta-potty was nearby. I dropped the broom and went there... shut the door and sat to figure out what I was going to do next.

After about ten minutes the Marine yanked the door open.

“What the fuck do you think you are doing...”

He pointed to a cheap gold-plated peace symbol I’d bought the day before while tripping. “Say, is that a peace symbol?”

I decided to return some of his contempt, “Yah, it is. Now you listen to me Private, I’m three months past my enlistment and I don’t need to take any crap from a boot-camp Jar-Head.”

He was stunned as I pushed past him. They hadn’t taught him how to handle brazen disobedience in boot camp.

“McGee, grab your broom or I’m writing you up!”

I just walked away and, from that day on, only showed up on payday at disbursing to collect my check and to see if my transfer orders had come. The disbursing Yeoman was curious because I always showed up in civvies.

“Where’s your unit, McGee?”

“Oh, I’m just waiting for orders,” I’d answer and he never asked again.

I spent another month on the beach doing exactly as I wished and when I wished to. I slept on the beach, showered at Fort De Russy, and tripped around with a young college student, Mandy, I’d met while snorkeling

I was in heaven. I’d been in the Navy, stationed out of Pearl Harbor for four friggen’ years and had not ever spent any extended time on the beach with a cute Wahini. Mandy was more than cute too. She made the bikini wrapped around her curves look better than any nudie show on Hotel Street.

A couple of months later I finally got my transfer orders to Treasure Island. We went to see Alice’s Restaurant where my mind was distracted by a sense of attachment and liberation. I was about to be free of a four-year commitment. I didn’t want to leave her or Hawaii but I also wanted to catch up on the scene in San Francisco and everything hippy that Arlo was singing about. I sadly bid Mandy, adieu.

“I’ll write and we can catch up on each other when you leave Hawaii,” I promised knowing I most probably wouldn’t follow through.

“Max, I don’t think so. It’s been nice but... well maybe.”

“Yah, you’re right. It sure has been nice.” and that was the last we heard of each other.

Treasure Island sits in the middle of San Francisco Bay between the links of the Oakland Bay Bridge. I was there to get my separation papers… my DD-214. They read:Separated from Active Duty under Honorable conditions, and that was all I wanted. I’d held up my end of the bargain I’d made so long ago and I swore a solemn oath to myself that I would never sell my freedom so cheaply and for so long ever again.

I got on the bus going into The City taking the rear seat. Sitting there I felt something called freedom for the first time in four years and three months. A grin fixed itself on my face like the Cheshire Cat. I breathed in the cool, autumn, San Francisco Bay air blasting through an open window. In the seats head of me were two sailors who turned to look.

“Are you high?” one of them asked.

“Yah, I’m high.” There was no hesitation in my reply.

“Do you have any for us?”

I held up the manila envelope, “I had to wait four years and three months for these… I guess you’ll have to wait to get yours if you wanna get this high.”

The two realized that I had no dope for them, agreeing that it was a high they would have to wait for; and turned back to leave me in my revelry.

I got off the bus below Market Street, stored my light bag in a locker, and took a sports bag with me over to Grant Ave. Market Street had changed since I went in the Navy in 1965. Back then it was a vital, buzzing hive of businessmen, street preachers, musicians and every kind of mom and pop shops selling anything from transistor radios to switchblade knives. But in the fall of 1969 the Bay Area Transit subway was under construction and the place looked like a ghost of its former self.

I walked down to Grant and on up to Bush, the entrance to China Town. There was no tiled Gateway for the tourists back then. It was a somewhat shabbier affair and low-rent. There, at the corner on my left, was the Saint Charles Hotel and across the street was another hotel, the Plaza. It was nothing like the Plaza Hotel of NY City fame but it might as well have been because, to me, sitting alone in the dark of my old room in the Saint Charles over four years ago; watching folks going in from cabs with the doorman handing their luggage over to bellhops, the Plaza was a symbol. I needed to stay there at least one night; my first night of freedom.

From A Time Ago & Then - Chapter 2. Tripping (pt.1)

It was late August by the time my cast was cut off and I was transferred to the Medical Holding Company on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. One of the things I’d purchased while convalescing was a Minolta 35 mm SLR. I fancied myself a photographer and, when I wasn’t in bars, took pictures around Waikiki and Honolulu. It was on one of these excursions, celebrating my twenty-third birthday, I met a couple of hippy looking dudes in a bar behind the International Market Place on Kalakaua. During the late sixties, this area behind the market on Kuhio was a known venue for drug dealers and muggers. I was drunk and oblivious to this as I talked with the two men in the bar.

“You guys know where I can score some pot?” I asked, knowing full-well these two, of all people, would. World-wise in foreign ports, I knew very little, or nothing, of what had been going down in the culture. I’d bought the myth about hippies being love, peace, pot, free love and LSD. I was soon to learn otherwise.

“Yah, sure, but we have to go a few miles to get it.” Agreed the one whose hair resembled the folk singer Donovan, “C’mon, how much do you need? We can get all you want. How much cash do you got?”

I jumped in the back seat of a four-door, beat-up, Mercury, while Donovan rode shot-gun. The driver was oddly quiet and emitted a sense of ominous foreboding as he drove up out of town into the hills and isolated road where a housing development was under construction. Mr. Ominous stopped the car on the side of the road that had a steep drop of about seventy-five feet above a place where there was nothing but the frames of houses on slabs. It was then that Donovan turned to me with his right hand and put a huge diving knife neatly to my throat.

“Gimme that goddamned camera and your money!” he demanded.

I was in a state of shock… I hadn’t even imagined, let alone seen it coming. I handed over my cash, about forty bucks, and the camera with my left hand flashing an expensive Zodiac diving watch.

“Gimme your watch too.”

Demanding the watch was just a bit too much for me. It wasn’t so much that I held an attachment to the watch but I wasn’t about to let this hippy have it all: my camera, my money and my watch! I put out my left hand with the watch as if to surrender it and, with my right hand, opened the door as Donovan turned to set down the camera on the floorboard. I rolled out, tucked and skied down the loose dirt of the slope to the bottom. I felt my lower back cry out but I didn’t have time to nurse it as I ran for the stacks of lumber set in a maze around one of the houses. Luckily for me, Donovan and Mr. Ominous didn’t bother to give chase on foot. They cruised back and forth on the roads around the development but gave up after a few minutes and sped off.

I thumbed a ride back to the base. It wasn’t hard to hitch a ride in those days. My clothes and face were filthy from rolling down the hill in the dirt and I had no money. Yet the Air Force First-Lewie who picked me up, hit-on me regardless. That is always how it was and, any other time, I might have played along for whatever I could con the guy out of otherwise but not this night. I, Max, who was always on the take, was taken this time. I just told the guy I was straight and the subject was dropped. I got back to the barracks and crashed.

There were a few stoners in the medical holding company; mostly section-eights awaiting orders. I was a month or so over the end of my enlistment by this time and I was itching to get back to civilian life. Two of the guys I bunked with had acquired some LSD and asked me if I’d ever done acid before. I was not about to admit that I hadn’t tripped. I only knew enough about acid to want to try it.

It sounds lame now but the language people used back then went, in the words of Jimi Hendrix, something like this: “Max, we got some acid bro, are you... Experienced?”

“Sure,” I lied, “I’ve done acid a bunch of times.”

My qualifying experience was an interview with Timothy Leary in Playboy I'd read but that was enough for me to pose as a big-time tripper.

“Good… you wanna trip with us tonight? We’ve never done it before and we’ve been told we ought to have an experienced guide for our first acid trip.”

“Where you want to trip?” I asked, using a tone of confidence and assurance to make them believe they would be in good hands. After all, I thought, it couldn't be that big a deal.

“We can go to the beach and hang out where there’s some live music if we get bored there,”  one of them volunteered.

The evening started out full of promise. I was excited to be able to experience acid but mostly to be able to say I’d done it. I’d lied to my buddies about having dropped LSD because I just didn’t want to admit to anyone that I hadn’t taken it. Once my pals admitted that they had not taken it, I was already committed to the lie and I knew how to lie well enough to stick to my story once I’d told it. I was undaunted by the fact that I was expected to be the “guide” for the evening simply because I had no idea what a mind-altering trip I was in for.

Once on the beach we dropped the orange barrel shaped tabs and passed around a bowl of Panama Red. We then waited for the trip to begin. After about a half hour I began to wonder whether we’d been ripped-off. Someone suggested we go to Kalakaua and hang out in front of one of the open-air clubs with a band. I shuffled along a path leading off the beach on a cement walkway partially covered with sand. The sound my feet made became hilariously funny.

I chuckled, the chuckle turned into chortle, and the chortle into a gut driven guffaw. Soon enough all three of us were laughing and shuffling our feet. The sand shuffling out from my feet was iridescent. The laughing was so intense I became alarmed. It was as if my whole body convulsed in one guffaw after another. I thought; Whew, I’ve got to get control of this thing or I’m going to freak out!

We all stopped laughing at once. It was as though there was a synchronistic mind-thread between us. Kalia Road with traffic loomed ahead. The signal light changed green. The others crossed and I followed. There was nothing to fear but, to me, the traffic took on a monstrous appearance… growling engines lined up to mow down and devour me at the change of the light. I found myself moving regardless. I became aware halfway across in the middle of the street that one step seemed to stretch out, taking an eternity, between lifting my foot and setting it down on the spongy pavement… like my leg was made of silly putty. Time seemed to stand still for a moment. I took note that none of the cars stopped at the light, or seemed impatient at all. In fact, I realized that I had been walking quite normally as I popped back into the present time/space relationship.

“Whew! This is more than I expected and we’ve just begun,” I mumbled to myself.

“Huh?” said one of my charges… “What did you say?”

“Nothin’; I just said I’m stoned!” I heard my own voice shouting as I reached the far side of the street. Everyone seemed to be walking normally. Everything was okay. “Just fine... Self,” I said again to myself.

“Huh?” my pal queried again.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“S-T-O….oh…oh…N-E-D… Freakin’ STONED!” he shouted back.

There were dozens of mini-adventures such as these that occurred along the way. Our freaking and stoned threesome finally reached an open-air nightclub where the music was blaring out into the street. We stood there outside on the sidewalk. A planter was all that separated us from the inside of the club. The live band caused the air to ripple out each note before my eyes the way the air does in the heat from the desert floor. I got into the music but, suddenly, I longed to get back to the beach and away from the noise. Since I was their trusted guide the others complied.

Back at the small wall on the beach, where we had smoked the Panama Red, now had a group of musicians. I was told they were members of the band, Steppenwolf, which had just played at the Concert Hall. I wasn’t sure if it was true but I had no reason to doubt it. Again, each note literally breathed and rippled out of the acoustic guitars. Then I got distracted and caught myself getting paranoid when people laughed or made comments to the side. One of the guitarists asked, “Is he okay?”

My fellow trippers, the ones I was supposedly guiding on this trip, affirmed, “Oh, he’s just stoned.”

They know, I thought. They know I’m a fraud and that this is my first trip… they know I’m an acid virgin, fa’ chrissakes! A friggen’ LSD virgin… well-o-well, I Am Experienced now!

I parted from the group and walked a hundred feet away… close enough to hear the guitar playing, and so on, but far enough away for a place to sit quietly and sort things out. I looked out across the lagoon to where the surf was breaking on the reef and lapping at the shore. My mind melded with how gloriously beautiful… how beautifully glorious each sound, each wave, each crystalline star shown above the horizon.

I sat there: a series of questions and answers came to me… “Why am I paranoid?”

“Because I lied to these guys about tripping,” pausing after each query.

“Why did you lie to them?”

“Because I didn’t want them to know I was straight.”

“Why didn’t you want them to know that?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“I was afraid they wouldn’t want to hang out with me if I weren’t hip.”

“Why would they care whether you were hip or not?”

“I’m not who I appear to be.”

“Why aren’t you who you appear to be?”

“It is a cover-up that started a long time ago.”

“Tell me about it.”

I sat there on the beach in Waikiki listening to the waves gently lap the shore and went over every lie I could remember and every reason to lie that I could think of. I sat there as the stars crossed from one point on the horizon to the next and grasped the whole cosmos in my consciousness… grasped it so well that I was sure I would hang on to it. The lapping of the waves on the shore was connected to the ocean of the cosmos… I saw and felt the rhythms of it all with an amazing clarity. I was sure that I would never lie again. On that mountain top, I saw that I didn't need alcohol or depressants: that from then on I would only expand rather than shut down my consciousness. Before the thought was through; however, I feared that a great cosmic truth, which had stirred me, could just as easily slip away… back to where it came from. Still, it was embedded in my consciousness so deeply the reality of it would recur at every important juncture in my life. Then the sun rose and the three of us headed back to the base.

We caught a launch to Ford Island. I leaned my head with an ear to the gunnels and gloried in this apocalypse, listening to the reverberation of waves slapping the hull of the launch as it made its way to the landing on Ford Island. Everyone was changing into uniform for muster when we got to our barracks and I stood there looking at my uniform. I said to myself and anyone in earshot, “Never again.”

“What, you don’t want to trip again?” my pal asked.

“Oh no, I will trip again alright.”

“What did you mean by, ‘Never again’?” he asked.

“That uniform. I’m not putting it on again. I am two months past my enlistment and I’m not putting that damned thing on again.”

I walked out and stood with the others in my civvies and answered “Here” when my name was called by the petty officer in charge of muster. The First Class Bos’n looked at me askance. I was prepared to answer anything asked of me and expected a good chewing out.

A Time Ago & Then - Chapter 1. Dry Dock

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 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.

My luck had run out but not because I didn’t play well. I knew every warp on the board of that machine:  I played good alright… too slick for the squids off the Coral Sea. They met me on the way back to the barracks and worked me over real good: crushed my cheekbone and a few ribs. I’d flipped over a retaining wall to get away and discovered 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, waiting 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.

“Oh, 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.

She could only see my smashed up face, “I don’t know… a few weeks?” She must have been in the dark about my crushed vertebrae.

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 penciled-in 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, Max… er, Seaman McGee. 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 swear he winced, “I’ve seen many healthy young men think the same as you, and sometimes…”

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

Now he was pissed, “… 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 was going to say something, but turned to go pray with someone more receptive on the ward.

I came out of the surgery alive despite 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.

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 or something.” 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.”

Oh shit, I thought, more mawkish concern, “Thanks to the morphine.” 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’s 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’s 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. Our section had 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 I 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 the boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

- Spoon River Anthology -

By

Edgar Lee Masters

A TV program played one evening 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; “Yah, 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.

“Yah, maybe it will work out,” he admitted without a hint of cynicism.

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?”

“Yah, 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. “Yah, 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 legs 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’ve been easy to read because the Jarhead in the bed next to me fended-off his grief by saying, “Yah, I think I’d like a taste of that too.”

I spent my first three months at Tripler Army General Hospital on a Foster Frame. The Foster Frame is a contraption designed to keep one’s spine aligned while it heals. It is a sort of cot that can have another part of the cot attached, like hot-dog buns, so that I, the wiener, can be flipped over without causing problems with the alignment of my vertebrae.

In other words, I lay completely prone for ninety days. Being flipped once every four hours was made tolerable with a steady flow of pharmaceuticals prescribed, traded, swapped, donated or bought from each other. The first week I had a Demerol-drip but caps or tabs of it and Darvon were my regular fare from then on. Besides that, the men back from Nam were rationed two cans of beer a day with their meals. There were enough GI’s who didn’t drink to pass on their ration to me and the other stoners. That kept us in good supply. We learned to open-up a Darvon cap and empty out the Tylenol to ingest only the little red B-B heart. A can or two of beer and six of those little red B-B’s provided a pretty good buzz. Those were my distractions but; most of all, in those first three months, I read.

The first challenge was getting my eyes to work together. After the gauze was removed from my left eye I found that the right eye focused faster, but the left was cacky-wampus, causing me to see double. To read I had to close my left eye. This was more than I was willing to tolerate. I practiced every free minute, getting the railings on the ceiling that held the curtains around my cot above me to align. Seeing double at first, I could only get them to align for a second or two. But, as days passed, I could hold the lines together for longer periods until, after a week or two, they stayed that way.

Once I managed to read with both eyes a whole new world opened-up. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; the Hobbit and the Tolkien Trilogy; Norman Mailer’s American Dream; John Hersey’s The Wall and Hiroshima; Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. What the Hospital library didn’t hold momentous events; live on TV, such as the Neil Armstrong’s, giant-steppin-leap-for- man-and-mankind, moon landing occurred. These readings and events stirred my soul toward adventure… an adventure that I’d given up on. For all practical purposes I’d given up on adventure when I dumped my wrap-around sunglasses in the contraband bin upon entering boot camp. I did manage to keep a leather-bound collection of Keats in boot-camp. I had to convince my Company Commander there that it was a Bible: the Bible being the only book that was not contraband. Because it was leather bound and looked like a bible, he approved it.

Sadly, Glenda graduated from high school before I could have any of that. She bid me adieu and thanked me for the experience as she was moving to Davis, California to study veterinary medicine. I ordered a dashiki for her, from the back of a Playboy, as a parting gift. The dashiki came just in time and she wore it to the ward on her last day as a gift to me.

“Thanks,” she turned to model it for me.

“It looks better on you than a Mu-Mu.”

“I promise I will write you often and let you know how I’m doing. Maybe we will see each other when you get out.”

I got a few letters from her after that but they stopped coming by September. I neither saw nor heard from her again.

Finally, my three months in the Foster Frame were up and I would be fitted into a body cast the next day. It was the middle of the night when I nearly sabotaged my recovery by attempting to get up and walk around a bit before being confined to the heavy, full-body, plaster-cast. After all, ninety days was plenty, as far as I was concerned, to mend a few crushed vertebrae. I thought I was special and I didn’t accept Dr.’s Orders, laws of physics or any other law.

First off, I gradually propped myself up on both elbows, keeping my back as straight as I could. As soon as my head was elevated a few feet the blood rushed from the brain and I passed out, falling back flat on the frame.

Whew! I thought. This could be serious trouble.

I lay there for about fifteen minutes and tried again. This time I was able to stay upright without passing out but was still dizzy. I swung my feet off the cot and noted the sensation of the legs filling with blood. Three months of being off one’s feet causes more than a few physical changes. First off the thick skin on the heels and pads of the feet peels off. I hadn’t given much thought of how much padding normal feet have until it all started coming off as those first weeks laid up passed. Then the cartilage in the joints becomes atrophied. As I set my feet on the floor I found out how much cushion the joints of the ankles and knees are needed. Searing pain shot out from my ankles and knees as I stood. I realized then that I might have made a serious mistake as far as my recovery was concerned and lay back down on the frame. It was a hard pill to swallow. I’d never understood until that night that there were physical limitations that even I had to accept.

It was too painful to walk very far at first but I could get around in a wheel-chair. I joined a roving gaggle of amputees and paraplegics who raced about the wards. We were usually stoned or drunk, seeking anyone who might part with a few of this or that to redistribute to ourselves and bed ridden friends back in the ward. I soon was doing wheelies and balancing perfectly with the best of them. I could even negotiate the stairs that way. It was high risk behavior but I didn’t see it that way at all.

I was passing time as the end of my enlistment drew nearer. I was allowed to go into town on a day-pass around the first part of July, even though I still wore the cast that covered my torso. I got down to the Jungle in Waikiki and scored pot to bring back to my pals on the ward. A couple of times I went to Hotel Street massage parlor where I knew one of the girls that would give me a hand-job for an extra ten bucks. But most of all I simply went to the bars and got good and wasted before coming back to the Hospital at night.