Diary of an Unbroken Child: My Autobiography Chap. V

Tune in, turn on and drop out...it became the mantra of the Sixties. I flew into San Diego on Pan Am with a couple of Army guys I had met at Tan Son Nhut waiting for a flight. One of them had just got out of the field hospital in Saigon and was kind of messed up. The other guy was a buddy from his platoon. We weren't in the airport five minutes when a bunch of hippies started giving them a bad time, calling names and yelling in their faces and shit. I grabbed one and smacked him around a little and the rest started screaming for the cops. Fucking sissies. Well the cops came and took me off in their squad car. We went down to the police station and I told the sergeant what happened. He thought it was pretty funny, so he had the cops give me a ride back out to the airport, telling me not to beat up any more hippies. That was my first encounter with the hippies.

Things had changed a lot since I was gone. I was in Vietnam a little over two years and when I left, things were pretty much normal...not so much when I got back. I flew into Logan in Boston and took a cab to the North End. I had an envelope full of cash, my pay for Vietnam. I guess I had around 15-18 G's on me. I ran down some of my old friends, Bobby was shooting heroin and living somewhere around St. Botolph St. in the South End, not a very good neighborhood. He told me I could crash with him. I guess that's what people did now- crash. I told him that was all right and took off, after he borrowed $20. Eddie the Cripple was living in Somerville and working for the City of Cambridge on the garbage trucks... you can laugh, but around there that was a dream job, like hitting the lottery.

Stealing cars and doing stuff like that wasn't all I did before. There was a bunch of us that used to get together and listen to Blues. I really loved that music and there were a few of us that had instruments and played some. I played guitar but I gave mine to Willie McDonald when I left. Most of the guys I played music with had taken off for California. It was May so I decided to grab a bus up to Hampton Beach and see if any of the guys I hung with up there a were around. It was a little early but there were usually a few guys that showed up before the season began.

Things had changed up there as well. My buddy Al was from Woburn or around there but was already up at the beach. He had grown his hair and was running around in old dirty jeans and sandals. He looked like a fucking beatnik so I told him so. He thought that was pretty funny and asked me if I wanted to get high. I had smoked pot once in boot camp with two black guys in the drying room. I didn't want to but they thought I would turn them in so I smoked it with them so they would think I was Ok and not some kind of rat. I didn't like it all that much. A lot of guys in Vietnam smoked and I tried it once or twice there but it messed with my focus and I had to keep my shit straight, doing what I did and all. So me, Al, this guy Dennis and a couple of chicks went to Al's motel room and got high. This time I kind of liked it, I was relaxed and all so it was pretty good.

I stuck around for a month or so, getting high every day and fooling with the chicks up there. The hippie things seemed like it was really taking off. All of the chicks that got high seemed like they would hop in the sack with you pretty easy. In fact, if you had a joint, you could get laid... and that made up a lot of what I wanted to do- get high, get laid and forget about Vietnam. Everybody was starting to talk about this place in San Francisco called Haight Ashbury and how it was the place to be. Everybody had started growing their hair long and used words like "groovy". So I started growing mine long too, when I got back from Nam I was "high and tight." I met this guy named Mark from around Worcester some place and his girlfriend Mary. We decided to go to Haight Ashbury, so I bought a car, a '66 SS 396. We took off across country.

Mark had family in Los Angeles, someplace in Riverside County, so we went there first. His uncle was a cop so it was pretty uncomfortable being there. Mark decided to stay in L.A. so Mary and me headed up to Frisco. We got to Haight St said our goodbye's and I took off toward Golden Gate park. I hadn't got two blocks when I ran into two guys from Connecticut I knew from Hampton Beach. They had just got there the day before. One of them, David, I think asked if I had a place to stay. I told him I just got there 5 minutes ago so he said that a friend Jaffee from Boston was managing an apartment building on the corner of Haight and Cole. We headed over there. It was unbelievable, almost all of my music buddies from Boston were there...Ray Davies (not THE Ray Davies), Johnny Goodwin, Jaffee, Moose, Entz Jackmann, who was from Germany. It was old home week! We all got high on some diet pills we got from these two fat chicks upstairs and played music all night, drinking wine and smoking pot.

The next day Moose and I went up to the park to check it out. He told me, you got to see this place, it's like a fucking circus or something and he was right. It was wild, people dressed up like God knows what. One guy had a turban on like a sheik or something. Chicks with no shirt on dancing around. Me and Moose met these two chicks from Greece that didn't speak a word of English so we took them in the bushes and screwed them there with people walking by and everything- it was like nobody cared. It was like one big party going on all the time. Out there in Haight-Ashbury I started dropping acid almost every day- it's what everybody was doing, so I just went with the flow. There was always something to do. We used to go up to a place called The Matrix where they had music- Steve Miller Blues Band played there a lot and so did Quicksilver Messenger service. There was also the Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom. The Greatful Dead were pretty big with the hippies, but I didn't like them- I thought their music sucked and they were assholes to boot, especially Bob Weir.

One day on Haight St. some kid with a puppy was panhandling for food for himself and his dog. I gave him a buck or so, but then Bob Weir comes along and gives the kid a ration of shit... so I called him out- Mr. Big Man, Mr. Peace & Love. You got no problem taking money from people, but you don't want to give nothing back. Well, one thing led to another and me and Mr. Peace & Love got into a fight. The guy was a phony and if there's one thing I can't stand is a phony. Anyway, one night we went to Winterland and saw Jimmy Hendrix, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Albert King and Big Brother and the Holding Company... for $2.50! I never cared much for Hendrix's music until I saw him live- man what a show. I was missing playing myself and when I did I had to borrow a guitar- it was time to get one of my own...

I went to the music store and bought a new guitar, a Gibson SG...I always liked them and I still had plenty of cash left. IN fact I still play an SG. Jaffee had this deal going where he could get kilos of pot from Mexico for $65. He was selling them for $80 so pretty soon I started selling pot. I didn't cost anything for rent because Jaffee managed the building and he collected the rent. All we had to do was pay utilities and we were good. I guess I stayed around there for about 5 months when I got a chance to move up to Guerneville in the Russian River. These people had a chalet in the Redwood Forest so I went up there.

Guerneville was a lot different than Haight Ashbury, it was pretty uptight. Every time a teenage girl ran away, the cops came and looked for them at our place... and it was usually not long after they had left. The chalet belonged to some doctor that this guy Hoss knew so the rent was free. There wasn't much to do up there, take acid and hang out. There was a fireplace in the house and one night when we were all tripping I went out to get some firewood. Hoss yells to me to watch out for the Redwood spiders. I ask him what the hell is a Redwood spider? He tells me they're about the size of a crab, about 6-8 inches across- they aren't poisonous but it hurts like hell when they bite you. They live in the trees and jump out on you. So here I am racing to the woodpile tripping by brains out watching for these giant spiders.

I liked it there ok, but it was a hassle living there with the cops around all the time and I had met this girl Kathy from Santa Rosa, so I moved there with her. The best part of living in Santa Rosa was that hardly anybody sold pot there. I met a biker guy that sold ounces and I'd go down to Frisco and get kilos and sell them to him. So I had a pretty good income. The chick upstairs was also named Kathy and I started screwing her too. She was a college student studying French at the local college. Her father was supposed to be some kind of scientist or something like that. He had written a book about Darwin- how space aliens came down and copulated with apes and we evolved from that. Then he offered all of this "evidence" about how it happened. I read it and I got to say, I think he was pretty much full of shit (but I didn't tell that to her). Life was pretty good, but I was starting to miss Boston. I'd been in California for about a year and a half. It was December of 1967 and I decided to go home.

I had sold my SS 396 some time back- it wasn't considered cool for a real hippie to drive a hot rod, they were for "greasers" and "hoods." So I took a Greyhound from San Francisco to Boston. My friends Johnny Goodwin, Moose and Entz had already come back. I stayed with them for a while, then I moved over to Cambridge with some guys from Chelsea I knew from Hampton Beach. I started playing in a band and we gigged around at a few places. I knew the Bolero Brothers from the North End and they had a bar, the Intermission Lounge in the Combat Zone. They called it the Combat Zone because it was where all the strip joints and dirty movie houses were. The sailors used to go there a lot. It was 1968 and the whole hippie thing was starting to take off in Boston. I already had long hair so I fit in fine. I guess I was growing up some, I was 22 and starting to notice things about all the hippies I didn't like.

To begin with they were a bunch of phoneys. All the Vietnam protests, signs saying "Bring Our Boys Home"...they didn't give a fuck about our boys. All they cared about was themselves. They used to sit around at parties and spout this philosophical bullshit about Nietzsche and Chairman Mao and Castro, like they were fucking good guys or something. I may not have known Schopenhauer from Plato, but I knew a bullshit artist when I saw one. All these people gave a shit about was themselves. All this phoney love bullshit was just a front for a bunch of chickenshit motherfuckers that thought they were too good to go to Vietnam. They weren't against the war, they were against being in it. My friends, my real friends had went and fought so these cocksuckers could feel good about themselves. Dennis Lucchese from the North End got shrapnel in his face and looked like a fucking jack-o-lantern that somebody kicked. Kids that saw him on the street cried. He was ten times the man than all those phoney pricks put together.

But their money was good and I decided to get all I could. I had a buddy in Berkeley named Alan who sold acid and the hippies loved acid (I had quit taking it by then- it was getting boring). I called Alan up and he agreed to fly out with 5000 hits to see what we could do. I had a friend Robert with some cash and I took him as a partner so Alan wouldn't get hung up in Boston. He started flying out every week with 10,000 hits. He would hang out for a few days and party and play music and head home. We paid a buck a hit and sold it for two. $10,000 a week split two ways, not bad. If you took acid in Boston in 1968, it came from me. Here's something funny: some of my best customers were at Harvard School of Divinity. Those guys loved the shit. They invited me to a party one night so I grabbed a bottle or two of nice wine, a bag of good weed and brought some "party favors." I get there and I'm like "Where's the chicks?" These guys' idea of a party was to drop acid and debate the finer points of Augustine and Aquinas.

One definite advantage about being the "Acid King" of Boston had some real advantages- especially when it came to chicks. Everybody used to hang around down at Boston Commons and I'd get up around 9, take a shower, eat breakfast and take a cab to the Commons to hang out and watch people sell my acid all day. Every night when I went home, I usually had a different chick with me... and it ain't because I'm good looking! It was a lot of fun, spending money almost as fast as I made it. I thought nothing about calling 2-3 cabs at 2:00 AM to take 5-10 of us to Kens Steakhouse on Boylston St fro a steak dinner. It was kind of an afterhours place where prople would go to eat after the theater or the symphony. We'd walk in, a bunch of hippies and everyone would stare at us... but the waitresses loved us because I'd always throw them at least a $20 tip. That's hard work, I respect waitresses, they take a lot of shit from assholes.

By late '69 or early '70 the hippie thing started dying out.The real fucked up ones kept going to college and are now the professors around the country. The rest started shooting heroin and ripping each other off. I did heroin for a few months and like everything else I ever did, I did a lot. I OD's once and these guys dropped me off at Mass General Hospital (outside). They pronounced me dead, but I woke up bare-assed naked on a gurney on my way to the morgue with a tag on my toe. You should have seen the guy's face that was in the elevator taking me down. He was a black guy and he turned whiter than me. I could see there was no future in heroin, like all the other drugs I had done- I was just trying to avoid life and feeling anything. Vietnam wasn't going to go away so I sucked it up and I went to work.