Chapter 4. The Pillow Shack

I had to Photoshop it the way it was back then.

A more recent photo of Altamont.
The Pillow Shack is still there!

The pillow shack was a concession stand at the top of the bleachers where cushions were rented out to make the wooden benches more comfortable for the spectators at the races. It had a plywood front that opened-up above a counter and the pillows were stacked against the walls. While the others took refuge in the race track tower, Miriam and I set-up shop in the pillow shack. We threw all the pillows on the floor, making for quite a nice bed among the hundreds of them. We had tried staying in the tower but there was no privacy.

The tower had a large reception room below it, and above the bleachers, where the members of the press were entertained and mingled with the drivers after the races: after all, Altamont Speedway was a race track. The room had a refrigerator, grill and wet bar, with a stereo system along with a view of the whole track. It became a shelter for those we referred to as the Clean-up Crew: a collection of street people who spent their days with us wandering around the property looking for drugs.  Surprisingly, the month I was there, the drugs found on the grounds surrounding the track never abated. So, being called a Clean-up Crew pertained mostly to the diligence with which we went out to restore our stash from the day before.

Many of the fences, alongside and in the area, were demolished by the hordes of concert goers in the mad-rush the hours preceding the concert. The neighboring ranchers were understandably peeved, to say the least, at the damages incurred. Dick Carter, who was wise enough to know the PR advantages of holding the concert in the first place, was undermined and destroyed along with his neighbor’s fences. He volunteered the services of the Clean-up Crew to help-out wherever we could. It was because of one such attempt that the Crew was invited to dinner with one of the neighbors.

We showed up at the rancher’s house in a pick-up truck provided by Mr. Carter. Once inside the house, I was pleasantly surprised at how polite and kind that he, and his family, treated this scraggly bunch of hippies. We were seated at a long table with the patriarch at the head of the table. A leather-bound Book of Mormon and a Bible were on the sideboard next to the table. The rancher had seven kids ranging in age from about six years to seventeen. The oldest among them were two squeaky-clean girls and their brother, around sixteen or so. Under the boy’s shirt I could tell that the kid was built as well or better than anyone that could be seen at Muscle Beach. The Crew was all seated around the table between the seven siblings and their father, who sat at the head of the table.

Dan and Linda were considered our leaders. They sat on each side of the patriarch while mom served us all and sat at the other end of the table. There was roast beef and apple pie right out of Norman Rockwell. I was charmed by how polite and well-mannered the kids were but, most of all, how gentle and gracious the ole man and his wife were. He was not at all the stereotypical redneck or self-righteous Mormon I might have expected him to be.

This whole affair was orchestrated so that the rancher could explain why he could not accept Dick Carter’s offer to help with the fences. Still, he wanted to get to know the Crew… perhaps to evaluate what we could offer and to size up our character. He told us how impressed he had been when he’d seen us on TV the day after the concert and was touched by the volunteer spirit that we displayed. I felt more than a little shame that picking up trash that was secondary to finding drugs for me, and most of the others, except for Linda and Dan. Furthermore, that I had been tripping so heavily from the night before I needed to occupy myself doing something that day, anything, or go nuts. Still, I was touched by what I perceived as an attempt by the rancher to get to know his new neighbors.

Before the meal started the Rancher asked everyone to introduce themselves, going around the table clockwise. Nodding to me he asked, “Do you know the Lord’s Prayer?”

“Eh, yes… yes sir, I do…” I wanted to explain that I didn’t believe in Jesus and was certainly not Christian but I was caught off-guard by the rancher’s courteous request.

“Then, we would be honored if you would lead us in prayer.”

I felt an oddly familiar warmth as I recited the prayer. I hadn’t said that prayer out loud since I was sixteen. I felt, in the deepest part of my soul, that it no longer mattered what I believed or didn’t believe. I sat at a table where people were bound by a spirit of generosity and peace that had been missing amid of the chaos of the previous week.

The meal went very well. The hospitality offered by this straighter than straight Mormon family to this motley crew of hippies and iconoclasts of every sort, was accepted with the same grace and spirit in which it was offered.

Back at the racetrack tower awaiting us were a couple of electrical engineers and friends from Livermore who had heard of the clean-up crew. They brought up; electric heaters, hooked up strobe lights to the stereo system, food and a couple of five-gallon water bottles along with several gallons of Red Mountain wine (the tap water was unpalatable… came out the spigot black, smelling of sulfur). It was party time… several tabs of acid were put in the wine jugs and, as was the custom for some in those days, the wine jugs were passed around communally. I hadn’t had any sort of alcohol since before the acid trip on the beach in Waikiki but figured, since the sacramental acid was in the wine, it would be rude if I passed on it and accepted it as almost a religious offering. I’d also hadn’t smoked tobacco since Tripler Hospital either and, since I was drinking wine, it felt okay having a smoke also… just one… or two… mind you.

The night wore on and the sunset from the tower was as glorious as any I had seen. We had sat, drank wine, passed joints, jumped up, danced all through the night, and one by one, dropped off to curl up in sleeping bags around the electric heaters as the next evening approached.

I fell asleep dreaming of pastures and sky and visions of wide open spaces. At some point my dreaming became filled with the acrid smell of smoke. I recognized it but wanted my dreaming to go back to more the pleasant visions. The acrid smell of smoke became heavier… so heavy I tried to wake up but it was as though the weight of a smoke daemon sat on my chest… weighing me down as I struggled for each breath as much as with waking. Finally, I was able to open my eyes and register what was happening.

It was dark but I could tell somehow that the darkness was from smoke… I realized this and then started to fall back asleep a few times before the shock of it hit me. I tried shouting out… “Smoke!” but my voice constricted as though hands were at my throat…. “Fire!” … “Fire!” I crawled out of my bag… made it to a light switch… a thick, gray, acrid layer of smoke filled the room from ceiling to floor.

I made out the cause of the smoke. One of the revelers had curled up next to a space heater and his sleeping bag was smoldering. I pulled the plugs on all the heaters and shook the occupant in the bag who awoke groggily annoyed and awaking angry as I repeated over and over, “Get up! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

It was some doing to rouse everyone. I was struck by how that one sleeping bag could smolder like that without waking the guy that was in the bag. It was slightly amusing at how pissed everyone was at being awakened. Once they realized the disaster that had been averted, I was grudgingly forgiven, but no one ever ceded to me hero status because of the incident.

Miriam and I retreated from the tower back to the pillow shack afterwards. It was a cozy place on rainy days. There was no need for space heaters for us as we sank down under a sea of pillows. Miriam was a curious girl. I had a hard time figuring her age or very much more than that about her. There were times she looked to be in her early teens but her experience told me she had to be much older. She didn’t reveal much about herself in conversations that were, up to this point, minimal.

Rising up from under the pillows I looked into her dark brown eyes beneath heavy eyebrows framed by short curly golden-brown hair. Her guarded stoicism caused me to suspect she had done time of one sort or another

I asked, “Have you ever been in jail?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, locked up… click, click … keys and bars.”

“No, why do you ask?”

“Fair question… I just sense it about you… it intrigues me. We have been in this pillow shack for some time and I know next to nothing about you.”

“How am I supposed to get a word in… All you do is talk about yourself… eh?” she tickled me under my ribs and laughed but something about her laugh was heavy … not bitter … sort of sad, I thought.

“Yah… well… you’re right. I do talk about myself but I am curious about you now.”

“A cat… you are a curious cat… hey, cat in the hat… What you wanna know about me?” She plopped a pillow on my head for a hat and laughed from her heart.

“Well… were you?”

“In jail? No.”

“In prison?”

“No.” She scrunched up her face and made her eyes cross under her thick lenses… “But I have been in a nut house.”

“How did that happen?”

“My dad committed me… Napa State.”

“Horrible… How? … Your dad? … What for? … Why?”

“It is a long story but it wasn’t so bad. I needed it and, yes, sometimes I miss it.”

“Really? I don’t get it.”

“I found God there…”

“Oh no… I didn’t mind you being a nut… a macadamia, a cashew, a walnut, f’chrissakes, but not a religious nut.”

“Oh yes, I am a holy rollin’ religious nut… what you gonna do about it… convert me to hedonistic despair?”

“So, you believe in God. No big deal. I believe sort of… not in a sky-bound Grandfather holding a good cloud for me when I die… but maybe… why not?”

“It isn’t idle speculation for me. I would still be locked up if it weren’t for God.”

“How did that happen?”

“They had me so fucked up on Thorazine… You ever see one of those Russian Dolls… One doll inside the other… on down to the tiniest they can go?”

“Yah…”

“Well I was down to that with a shell over a shell over a shell and I couldn’t get out. They kept me on that damned Thorazine … I could hardly move.”

I hadn’t heard her talk this passionately about anything. Still, I couldn’t let her off that easily… “How did God get you out of there?”

She crossed her eyes again and scrunched up her face, “One day He just walked in the door and handed me the keys, Max.”

I stepped out the door to the shack watching “the kid”, Norman, coming towards the shack.

Norman was no more than sixteen and looked it with his unkempt shoulder length blondish hair framed an almost angelic face. Later, I would appreciate Norman’s street smarts and, while I was older and could have been a mentor for the kid, it was obvious to me to determine who was mentoring whom.

“Hey Max, I’m going to Portland in the morning… you and Miriam wanna go with me?”

“How are you getting there?”

Norm held up his thumb and smirked a, “Duh!” gesture.

I glanced at Miriam… she smiled at Norm and saying “No, I’d rather stay here a few more weeks with the gang… Big Mama and Linda need some female energy around this place.”

It was true. Popular media often promotes the impression that the sixties were about free love and free love meant one big orgy. Perhaps this was the case on college campuses but the usual situation for street people was that the streets were populated mostly by young males… convicts, draft dodgers, and runaways from middle class suburban homes or mental institutions. Young women were generally not out there hitch-hiking around the country. In discussing the phenomena Miriam pointed out, “Men don’t have to find a place every month to do something about panhandling up a box of Tampons. Men aren’t the ones who get knocked up and have kids that need to be tended to.”

“Oh, hadn’t thought of that.”

The clean-up crew consisted of a dozen young men and three women. I found it peculiar that there was always a woman in any hippy group referred to as “Big Mama”. In this case Big Mama wasn’t all that big but she was very maternal and she helped make sure that there was always at least a pot of beans or spuds on the stove. Big Mama was also gay and so none of the young males were getting any action from her. Dan had Linda and I had Mariam… the rest had to pound one out or forget about sex entirely.

I wasn’t ever very sure exactly how this counter-culture deal went down for sexual relations. My observations did not agree with anything that was put out there by the media… alternative or mainstream. The impression I got from afar, when I was overseas, was that everyone States-side was hopping around like crazy sex-bunnies but I simply had not seen any of that sort of thing happening very much at all. On the surface, I didn’t want to be possessive of Miriam and take on the traditional role of a monogamous relationship but, in my heart, I wasn’t so sure I could cope with it if Miriam wasn’t my girl… my girl exclusively. Still, I tried to be open to her making her own choices and, hell, I’d only known her a few weeks anyway.

A Time Ago &... Chapter 3. San Francisco & Altamont Speedway (pt-2)

the nasty vitriol and hot-air from the “alternative
press” would have sent a thousand
balloons into the stratosphere.

While awaiting the day’s wonders, I struck up a conversation with a young couple sitting 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 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 willing to feign interest in every detail as she explained her Buddhist beliefs. However, 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 I’d heard of in churches. 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 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 porta-potties 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 porta-potty, I saw people pissing where they stood: women simply hiked up their skirts and squatted on the spot.

At another juncture 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 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!” Then the Stones stopped playing. Jagger called out to the outa-control crowd, “C’mon people.... people, people...!” No one where I stood, crushed in the crowd, an anonymous sardine, could see what was happening.

After the music was over, the crowd was 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 were 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, ate it, and also reclaimed another baggie 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 were doing the same further down the hill. By this time the stage and amp towers had been broken down and the port-a-potties 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:

Like the sage, he said, “Because the trash is here.”

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

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 didn’t see 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. No one there... not one person having anything at all to do with the clean-up, saw any sign of such a group at the Speedway. 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-in 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.

It was expected of the Chronicle and the Examiner, but the nasty vitriol and hot-air from the “alternative press” would have sent a thousand balloons into the stratosphere.

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.