Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King OF The Beats" Jack Kerouac-The Long Sixties Indeed-My encounter with Owsley-By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2011

My encounter with Owsley

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2011

[Owsley Stanley, an iconic figure from the Sixties who gained fame as a producer of LSD and as a sound man for the Grateful Dead, died March 13, 2011, in an automobile accident in Queensland, Australia. Stanley supplied what Rolling Stone Magazine once called "the best LSD in the world" to Ken Kesey, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles, and, through his work with the Dead, revolutionized the art of rock and roll sound engineering. See The Guardian's obituary after Paul Krassner's article below.]

In 1967, there was a concert in Pittsburgh, with the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs, and me, playing the part of a stand-up satirist.

There were two shows, both completely sold out, and this was the first time anybody had realized how many hippies actually lived in Pittsburgh.

Backstage between shows, a man sidled up to me. “Call me ‘Bear,’” he said.

“Okay, you're ‘Bear.’”

“Don't you recognize me?”

“You look familiar, but--”

“I'm Owsley.”

“Of course – Owsley acid!”

Fun fact: His nickname, “Bear,” was originally inspired by his prematurely hairy chest.

Now he presented me with a tab of Monterey Purple LSD. Not wishing to carry around an illegal drug in my pocket, I swallowed it instead.

Soon I found myself in the front lobby, talking with Jerry Garcia. As people from the audience wandered past us, he whimsically stuck out his hand, palm up.

“Got any spare change?”

Somebody passing by gave him a dime, and Garcia said thanks.

“He didn't recognize you,” I said.

“See, we all look alike.”

In the course of our conversation, I used the word “evil” to describe someone.

“There are no evil people,” Garcia said, just as the LSD was settling into my psyche. “There are only victims.”

“What does that mean? If a rapist is a victim, you should have compassion when you kick 'im in the balls?”

I did the second show while the Dead were setting up behind me. Then they began to play, softly, and as they built up their riff, I faded out and left the stage.

Later, some local folks brought me to a restaurant which, they told me, catered to a Mafia clientele. They pointed out a woman sitting at a table. The legend was that her fingers had once been chopped off, and she’d go to a theater, walk straight up to the ticket-taker, hold up her hand and say, “I have my stubs.”

With my long brown curly hair underneath my Mexican cowboy hat, I didn't quite fit in. The manager came over and asked me to kindly remove my hat. I was still tripping. I hardly ate any of my spaghetti after I noticed how it was wiggling on my plate.

I glanced around at the various Mafia figures sitting at their tables, wondering if they had killed anybody. Then I remembered what Jerry Garcia had said about evil. So these guys might be executioners, but they were also victims.

The spaghetti was still wiggling on my plate, but then I realized it wasn't really spaghetti, it was actually worms in tomato sauce. The other people at my table were all pretending not to notice.

It was, after all, the Summer of Love.

“Thanks for enhancing it, ‘Bear.’”

[For years, Paul Krassner edited The Realist, America's premier satirical rag. He was also a founder of the Yippies. The above was excerpted from the expanded edition of his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture -- not sold in any bookstores; available only at paulkrassner.com and as a Kindle e-book.]


Owsley Stanley at his 1967 arraignment for LSD possession. Photo from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Owsley Stanley, 1935-2011:
Prolific LSD producer and
icon of the 1960s counterculture

By Michael Carlson / The Guardian / March 15, 2011

The American psychologist Timothy Leary's famous invitation to "tune in, turn on and drop out" changed a generation. The key element was "turn on" and it was Owsley Stanley who provided the means to do just that. Stanley, who has died at age 76, produced millions of doses of "acid", the psychedelic drug LSD, which fueled the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and spread around the world.

Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze was the consequence of Stanley's Monterey Purple acid; his varieties included White Lightning and Blue Cheer and aficionados called the best acid simply "Owsley". He supplied the Beatles at the time of their Magical Mystery Tour television film (1967), and provided the acid to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest novelist Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters", whose 1964 bus trip across America was chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

Stanley's acid turned hippies on and he also tuned them in. The band on Kesey's bus was the Grateful Dead, with whom Owsley began an instantly synergistic relationship. The Dead took to his acid with such enthusiasm that Jerry Garcia became "Captain Trips", while Stanley funded their career and became their sound engineer, creating their unique live sound and, by recording each concert, providing the most complete archive of any band of the era. Along with Bob Thomas, he designed the band's "Steal Your Face" lightning bolt and skull logo, originally so his masses of sound equipment could be identified easily.

Stanley was also the quintessential drop-out. Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, his grandfather of the same name had been governor of Kentucky, a US senator and congressman. His father, a state's attorney, was pushed by wartime experiences into alcoholism. After his parents separated, he lived first with his mother in Los Angeles, then returned to his father and was sent to military school.

Nicknamed "Bear" when he began sprouting body hair, he was expelled from school for getting his ninth-grade classmates drunk. He spent more than a year as a patient at St Elizabeth's, the Washington psychiatric hospital that also housed Ezra Pound, and tried college, but eventually joined the air force. His electronics training there led to work on radio stations in Los Angeles, while studying ballet and working as a dancer.

In 1963 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began smoking marijuana and selling fellow students morning-glory seeds for a legal high. The next year, he encountered LSD. He spent three weeks studying the then-legal drug's chemistry, and began producing it himself. Quitting college and working at a local radio station, he set up the "Bear Research Group" to make acid. By the time he met Kesey in September 1965, he had become the first private producer of LSD on a grand scale.

Along with Tim Scully he set up a massive lab in Port Richmond, at the northern end of San Francisco Bay; when LSD became illegal in California in 1966, Scully moved to a location opposite the Denver zoo. Stanley stayed ahead of the law by keeping his acid in a small trunk which he shipped between bus stations, but after a 1967 raid his defence was that the 350,000 acid tabs police confiscated were for his personal use. He fought the case for two years, but his bail was revoked when he and the Dead were busted in New Orleans in 1970, and he was sentenced to three years in prison.

Once released, he resumed working for the Dead. His mentoring of the band had floundered in 1966, because while sharing his house in Los Angeles's Watts ghetto they also had to share his carnivorous life-style. Stanley believed that carbohydrates poisoned the body and vegetables interfered with nutrition. Arguing with his fierce but erratic intelligence was challenging: "There's nothing wrong with Bear that a few billion less brain cells wouldn't cure," said Garcia.

On a practical level, Stanley's perfectionism meant that sound systems took too long to set up and take down, and he feuded with the business-first approach of Lenny Hart, the band's manager and father of drummer Mickey. But in 1973 he delved into his archive to release Bear's Choice, a tribute to the recently deceased Dead co-founder, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, and in 1974, at a concert in San Francisco's Cow Palace, he inaugurated the 604-speaker Wall of Sound.

Owsley later organised sound for Jefferson Starship and Dead bassist Phil Lesh's solo projects, and scraped a living selling marijuana and making jewelery, a trade he learned in prison. In 1985 he met his third wife, Sheilah, and they moved to the Australian outback, squatting on 120 acres of remote land outside Cairns, convinced there was an oncoming Ice Age which would be best survived there. He believed that global warming was part of a natural cycle, rather than man-made.

In 2005, Stanley contracted throat cancer, attributing his survival to starving the tumour of glucose through diet. He died and his wife was injured when his car ran off a road in Queensland, and crashed into a tree. He is survived by Sheilah; by two sons, Pete and Starfinder; by two daughters, Nina and Redbird; and is remembered in the Dead's song Alice D Millionaire and Steely Dan's Kid Charlemagne.

[Michael Carlson is a sportswriter (and former tight end at Wesleyan University). He also writes obituaries for the British daily, The Guardian, where this article first appeared.]

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check-Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days when I heard Tom Wolfe (not Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angels, etc.) the writer of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s to space flights in the 1970 to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died,  I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories without knowing he had passed.

I don’t know how he did at the end as a writer, or toward the end although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina but pound for pound in his prime he could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.   

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test

01 December 2010

Ivan Koop Kuper : Ken Kesey's Houston Acid Test

The original "Furthur," the magic bus of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, on the road. Photo from NoFurthur.

Paying Larry McMurtry a visit:
The Merry Pranksters' last acid test

By Ivan Koop Kuper / The Rag Blog / December 1, 2010

HOUSTON -- In the heat of a July Houston morning in 1964, residents of the quiet Southampton neighborhood woke up to find a strangely painted school bus parked in front of an unassuming two-story brick house in the middle of the block.

The vintage 1939 International Harvester with its passengers of “Merry Pranksters” drove half way across the United States and was now parked in front of the house of novelist and Rice University professor, Larry McMurtry. The Southampton neighbors would learn that the brightly painted bus whose destination plate read “FURTHUR,” with two u's, was filled with strangely acting and even stranger looking people from California.

The leader of the Merry Pranksters was author Ken Kesey, whose novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, had just been published that summer. Their cross-country road trip to New York City was in part a celebration to commemorate the publication of his second novel, as well as the fulfillment of a request by his publisher for a personal appearance and an excuse to visit the World’s Fair taking place in the borough of Queens.

Fueled by the then-legal hallucinogenic drug LSD, Kesey and the Pranksters stopped in Houston along the way to visit McMurtry, who Kesey knew from their days at Stanford.

McMurtry lived with his 2-year-old son, James, on the oak-lined street near Rice University, where he taught undergraduate English.


Larry McMurtry and son, James, 1964. Photo from The Magic Bus.

McMurtry was also experiencing success in his life during this time. His inaugural novel, Horseman, Pass By, had been adapted into a screenplay and released as the feature-length movie, Hud, staring Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas, the previous year.

“I remember walking down Quenby Street one afternoon and seeing the school bus parked in front of the McMurtry’s house,” said Kentucky-based artist Joan Wilhoit. “It was very atypical and pretty damn psychedelic with lots of colors. The Pranksters were very accommodating and invited us on the bus. They were very different, sort of proto-hippies, and I remember they painted their sneakers with Day-Glo paint. My parents befriended them and brought old clothes and hand-me-downs to those who needed it. My parents weren’t rude like some of the other neighbors were.”

Wilhoit, who was nine at the time. remembers that not all the neighbors were as welcoming as her parents and that some made sarcastic remarks about the Pranksters.

“’Do you have a bathroom on that bus?’ I remember one our neighbors asking the Pranksters through the school bus window,” the former Houstonian recounted. “I also remember hearing about the ‘naked girl’ and I thought it was the strangest thing how the police were called and how she had to be admitted to a psych ward of some Houston hospital.”

“Stark Naked,” as she was referred to in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the novel that chronicled the exploits of Kesey and the Pranksters in the 1960s, was a bus passenger apparently “tripping” throughout her bus ride to Houston, who discarded her clothing in favor of a blanket that she wore for the duration of the journey. Upon her arrival in Houston, she experienced an episode of “lysergically-induced” psychosis, and confused McMurtry’s toddler son with her own estranged child, “Frankie.”


"Stark Naked" (aka "The Beauty Witch") wore nothing but a blanket. Photo from The Magic Bus.

Three years later, the brightly painted bus was parked once again in front of McMurtry’s house on the oak-lined street near Rice Village. Kesey and the Pranksters returned to Houston in March 1967 to visit their old friend and to conduct what is purported to have been the last “acid test.” The social experiment was staged in the dining room of Brown College, a residential facility on the campus of Rice University, with McMurtry acting as faculty sponsor.

“I would have been 14 years old when they returned,” said Pricilla Boston (nee Ebersole), an employee of the department of state health services in Austin and the mother of two teen-aged sons.
I remember getting off the school bus from junior high one afternoon and seeing that the painted bus was parked in front of Mr. McMurtry’s house again. It was immensely colorful and there was no missing it, that’s for sure. All the kids in the neighborhood used to play street games at night a lot and it was almost like there was another set of kids in the neighborhood.

They had a youthful, fun vibe about them. I remember this one skinny guy in particular who would interact with us; he was younger than the others and he showed us the inside of the bus. He once asked us to go home and look in our parents’ medicine cabinet to see if they had any bottles of pills and bring them to him. I was asking myself "Why would he want those?"
Boston recounted following the skinny Prankster’s instructions and looking in her parent’s cabinet. “I don’t remember whether I brought him anything or not,” she said, “I just remember having a sense of what I was doing as being a little bit naughty.”

Although Kesey’s arrival and the ensuing acid test were promoted as a “concert” in the March 9 issue of the Rice Thresher, the campus student newspaper, this non-event turned out to be an acid test in name only. The promise of a reenactment of the “tests” conducted in California between 1965 and 1966 never materialized. Absent was the liquid light show, the live, amplified rock music, the pulsating strobe lights and movie projector images on the walls.

Also conspicuously absent was the mass dispensation and ingestion of psychotropic drugs by the Rice student body and other “assorted weirdos” in attendance. Instead, the Pranksters indulged the more than 200 attendees with a “madcap improvisation” of toy dart-gun fights, human dog piles, deep breathing demonstrations by Kesey himself, and rides on the “magic bus” around the Rice campus.

“The great Kesey affair was an absolute dud,” reported the Houston Post on March 21. “Some of the kids hissed while he [Kesey] read some kind of incantation, and others just left talking about what a drag it was.”

[Ivan Koop Kuper is a graduate student at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas, and maintains a healthy diet of music, media, and popular culture. He can be reached at kuperi@stthom.edu.]



Merry Pranksters in the news, 1964. Top, in Houston, and below, in Springfield, Ohio.


Prankster Hermit and the original bus. Photo from Lysergic Pranksters in Texas.


Top, Ken Kesey with restored bus, by then renamed "Further" with an "e". Below, the 1939 International Harvester, before restoration, at the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, after being stored in the swamp for 15 years. Photo by Jeff Barnard / AP

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 10:50 AM
Labels: American History, Drug Culture, Houston, Ivan Koop Kooper, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, LSD, Merry Prankstes, Psychedelics, Rag Bloggers, Rice University, Sixties, Tom Wolfe

Out In The Be-Bop, Be-Bop 1960s Night- The Great San Francisco Summer Of Love Explosion-Or When Owsley Turned The World Upside Down.

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Byrds performing their classic wa-wa song So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star to give a flavor of the times to this piece

CD Review

1967: Blowin’ Your Mind, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1990

Scene: Brought to mind by one of the songs in this compilation, The Byrds Filimore West-driven classic wa-wa song, So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star .

Phil Larkin, now road-weary “Far-Out” Phil Larkin, for those who want to trace his evolution from North Adamsville early 1960s be-bop night “Foul-Mouth” Phil, the vocal terror of every mother’s daughter from six to sixty (and, occasionally, secret delight, secret delight of one Minnie Callahan, damn him, for one of some girl classmates), to full-fledged merry prankster now sits on a 1967 be-bop night San Francisco hill with his new flame Butterfly Swirl, and his old flame, Luscious Lois, now transformed into Lilly Rose, transformed at the flip of a switch, as was her way when some whim, or some word in the air, hit her dead center. (Sometime, but not now, remind me to give you my take on this name-changing epidemic as not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. Yes, remind me.) A nameless hill, nameless to first time ‘Frisco Phil, although maybe not to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland the sea out in the bay working it way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away.

But enough of old-time visions, of old time rites of passage, and of foundling dreams. Phil, and his entourage (nice word, huh, no more girlfriend solo, or as here paired, lovingly paired, to be hung up about, just go with the flow). Phil, Butterfly, hell, even jaded Lilly Rose (formerly known as Luscious Lois in case you forgot, or we not paying attention) are a “family,” or rather part of the Captain Crunch extended intentional family of merry pranksters (small case, so as not to be confused with their namesakes and models legendary mad man writer Ken Kesey and his La Honda Merry Pranksters, okay) who just yesterday hit ‘Frisco and have planted their de rigueur day-glo bus in the environs of Golden Gate Park after many months on the road west, and some time down south in La Jolla. After hearing the siren call they have now advanced north to feast on the self-declared Summer of Love that is guaranteed to mend broken hearts, broken spirits, broken rainbows, broken china, and broken, well broken everything. The glue: drug, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, although not just any old-timey be-bop fifties rock and roll but what everybody now calls “acid” rock. And acid, for the squares out there, is nothing but the tribal name for LSD that has every parent from the New York island to the Redwood forests, every public official from ‘Frisco to France, and every police officer (I am being nice here and will not use the oink word) from the Boston to Bombay and back, well, “freaked out” (and clueless). Yes, our Phil has come a long way from that snarly wise guy corner boy night of that old town he lammed out from (according to his told story) just about a year ago.

Or has he? Well, sure Phil’s hair is quite a bit longer, his beard less wispy and more manly, his tattered Chuck Taylor sneakers transformed into sensible (West Coast ocean sensible) roman sandals and his weight, well, his weight is way down from those weekly bouts with three-day drug escape, and fearful barely eaten four in the morning open hearth stews, and not much else. And as he sits on that nameless hill with his “ladies” he no longer has the expectation of just trying LSD for the hell of it, having licked it (off a blotter), or drank it (the famous, or infamous, kool-aid fix), several times down in La Jolla, watching the surf (and surfers) splashing against the Pacific world with blond-haired, blue-eyed, bouncy Butterfly, and the raven-haired, dark as night-eyed Lilly Rose, or both listening to the music fill the night air. Not square music either (anything pre-1964 except maybe some be-bop wild piano man Jerry Lee Lewis, or some Chicago blues guitar fired by Muddy Waters or microphone-eating Howlin’ Wolf), but moog, boog, foog-filled music.

Just that nameless hill minute though, and to be honest, while in the midst of another acid trip (LSD, for the squares just in case you forgot), Phil sensed that something had crested in the Pacific night and that just maybe this scene will not evolve into the “newer world” that everybody, especially Captain Crunch, keeps expecting any day now. Worst, now that he knows he can’t, no way, go back to some department clerk’s job, some picket-fenced white house with dog, two point three children, and a wife what is to happen to him when Butterfly, Lilly Rose, and even Captain Crunch “find” themselves and go back to school, home, academic careers, or whatever. Heavy, man, heavy.

***Out In The Be-Bop, Be-Bop 1960s Night- The Great San Francisco 1967 Summer Of Love Explosion

Out In The Be-Bop, Be-Bop 1960s Night- The Great San Francisco 1967 Summer Of Love Explosion

Phil Larkin, just then road-weary “Far-Out” Phil Larkin, for those who want to trace his evolution from North Adamsville early 1960s be-bop night “Foul-Mouth” Phil, the vocal terror of every mother’s daughter from six to sixty to full-fledged merry prankster, sat on a June such-and-such a 1967 be-bop night a nameless San Francisco. [Markin: And, occasionally, secret delight of some girls, secret delight of one Minnie Callahan, damns him, for just one example of such girl classmates with his foul mouth back in that North Adamsville night.] Along side him sat new conquest, not conquered with his old time wicked corner boy devil-inspired charm but with mere patter (and dope), new flame Butterfly Swirl met on a La Jolla beach a month or so back, not entirely by accident. And next to her his old flame, old in that quickly met moment, this merry prankster bus flame met in Ames, Iowa last year, accidentally except to those cosmically inclined, and Phil was not one of them not one bit, Luscious Lois. Lois, however, now transformed into Lilly Rose, transformed at the flip of a switch, as was her way when some whim, or some word in the air, hit her dead center. Along the road west, again by whimsy she had been variously, Lupe Matin, Loretta Nova, Lance (figure that one) Opal, and so on. (Phil just got to calling her honey, or sweet pea, and left it at that)

[Markin: Sometime, but not now, remind me to give you my take on this name-changing epidemic. Not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. Hell, I got caught up in it myself, and was, for a time, Blackie Saint James. Yes, remind me.]

Yes, it had been one long roller coaster year for Foul-Mouth. [Markin: Alright, let’s split the difference since I knew him way back when in that weird early 1960s corner boy night when he didn’t know from nothing about which way the winds were blowin’, could have cared less which way they were blowin’, or if they were, and made fun of me, as did Frankie Riley, and a couple of others, although not Sammy Russo, when I said some big changes were coming that would throw off our school, work, green lawn little white house with picket fence, two point four children, mongrel dog futures, and call him Phil from here on in. Foul-mouthed or far out he was some hell-bound character then.) From the bowels of despair rank and file no serious future retail clerk hustling mens’ apparel up at Raymond’s Department Store in slowing dying (dying from suburban mall-itis, then all the rage) Adamsville Center, harassed beyond endurance at home for lacking some unfathomable ambition from dear mother, with an occasional assist from dad (that ambition entailing pursuing some low-rent, GS-10, government job with security unto the grave, egad), and a late sniffing of that wind that this fellow corner boy had predicted was coming although he, this corner boy, was vague on the contours of that change Phil broke out one night.

Literally late one night, one May 1966 night. Around two in the morning, with his earthy belongings on his back in a old time World War II army knapsack picked up at Bill’s Army &Navy Store Phil lit out like Walt Whitman way back when, 19th century when, to places unknown and Jack Kerouac and his gang just a few years, late 1940s when, before for the coast, although if you had mentioned those names to him then he would have stared blankly back at you. Maybe now too. But here, let’s let Phil tell the story for a while about how he got to ‘Frisco and then we’ll see what is up with him and his “family” (okay, okay, Butterfly Swirl and Lilly Rose, if that is her name by the time we back) on that nameless 1967 San Francisco hill:

“Hey, I am no slave to convention, whatever the conventions are, but in those days I looked like a lot of young guys. Longish hair, a beard, a light beard at the time, blue jeans, an army jacket, sunglasses, a knapsack over my shoulder, and work boots on my feet. Sandals would not come until later when I got off the road and was settled in a “pad” [Markin: house, rented or maybe abandoned, apartment, hovel, back of a “free” church, back of a store, whatever, a place to rest those weary bones, or “crash”] in La Jolla and were, in any case, not the kind of footwear that would carry you through on those back road places you might find yourself in, places like Deadwood, Nevada at three in the morning with a ten mile walk to the nearest town in front of you. I mention all this because that “look” gave me the cache to make it on the road when I headed out of the house that Spring 1966 be-bop night after one final argument with dear mother about where I was going, what was I going to do when I got there, and what was I going to do for money. Standard mother fare then, and now I suppose.

So short on dough, and long on nerve and fearlessness then, I started to hitchhike with the idea of heading west to California like about eight million people, for about that same number of reasons, have been heading there since the Spanish, or one of those old time traveling by boat nations, heard about the place. Of course, nowadays I would not think to do such a thing in such a dangerous world, unless I was armed to the teeth and that would take a little edge off that “seeking the newer world” Markin has been blabbing about since about 1960. But then, no problem, let’s get going. Especially no problem when just a few miles into my journey a Volkswagen mini-bus (or van, neither in the same league as the yellow brick road school bus, no way, that I will tell you about later but okay for a long ride, and definitely okay when you are in some nowhere, nowhere Nebraska maybe, back road, hostile territory dominate by squares, squares with guns and other evil implements and they, the VW-ites, stoned, stoned to the heavens stop to ask you directions because they are “lost” and invite you on board) stopped on Route 128, backed up, and a guy who looked a lot like me, along with two pretty young girls said, “where are you heading?” (Okay, okay, Markin, young women, alright.) West, just west. And then the beatified words, “Hop in.”

Most of the road until the Midwest, Iowa is the Midwest, right, was filled with short little adventures like that. A mini-bus frolic for a few hours, or a few days. Maybe a few short twenty miles non-descript square Chevy rides in between but heading west by hook or by crook. Did I like it? Sure I did although I was pretty much an up-tight working class guy (that was what one of those pretty girls I just mentioned called me when I “passed” on smoking a joint and, hell, she was from next door Clintondale for chrissakes) who liked his booze, a little sex [Markin: Phil, come on now, a little?], and just hanging around the old town waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I could see, after a few drug experiences, no, not LSD, that I was starting to dig the scene. And I felt every day that I was out of North Adamsville that I was finally shaking off the layers of dust that I had acquired from that place.

Then one night, sitting in the front seat of a big old Pontiac (not everybody, not every “hip” everybody had the mini-bus, van, or school bus handy for their “search” for the great American night), Big Bang Jane between us, the Flip-Flop Kid driving like god’s own mad driver, smoking a joint, laughing with the couple in back, Bopper Billy and Sweet Pea, we headed into a pay-as-you go roadside camp near Ames out in Iowa. And at that campsite parked maybe five or six places over from where we planted ourselves was god’s own copy of that day-glo merry prankster bus I mentioned before. I flipped out because while I had hear about, and seen from a distance, such contraptions I hadn’t been up close to one before. Wow!

Markin had it just about right when he described that old bus after I told him about it so let me crib what he said:

“A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s, come flame or flash-out. Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma”-ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as the search for the great blue-pink American Western night.”

“Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo splashes and zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware and nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffle bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean. Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew or a made-up bed there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food was what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop traveling night you took a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you could find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and worked out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high- grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically.”

After we settled in at our campsite, the Flip-Flop Kid (and the guy really could never make up his mind about anything, anything except don’t go too close to Big Bang Jane, no kidding around on that), Bopper Billy (who really thought he was king of the be-bop night, but, hell in the North Adamsville corner boy night Frankie Riley, hell, maybe even Markin, would have out be-bopped him for lunch and had time for a nap), Big Bang Jane (guess what that referred to, and she gave herself that nickname, but I never tried to make a move on her because she was just a little too wild, a little too I would have to keeping looking over my shoulder for me then, probably later too when things got even looser. And then there was the Flip-Flop Kid’s warning ), and Sweet Pea (and she was a sweet pea, if Bopper Billy, wasn’t around, well we both agreed there was something there but in those 1966 days we were still half tied up with the old conventions of not breaking in between a guy and his girl, well that was the convention anyway and whether it was generally honored or not, I did honor it) we headed over once we heard the vibes from the sound system churning out some weird sounds, something like we had never heard before. (Weird then, little did we know that this was the wave of the future, for a few years anyway).

Naturally, well naturally after the fact, once we learned what the inhabitants of the bus were about, they invited us for supper, or really to have some stew from a big old pot cooking on a fireplace that came with the place. And if you didn’t want the hell-broth stew then you could partake of some rarefied dope. No, again, no on the LSD thing. It was around, it was around on the bus too, among its various denizens, but mainly it was a rumor, and more of a West Coast thing. In the self-proclaimed, tribal self-proclaimed Summer of Love and after that is when the acid hit, and when I tried it, but not on this trip. This trip was strictly weed, hemp, joint, mary jane, marijuana, herb, whatever you wanted to called that stuff that got you high, got you out of yourself, and got you away from what you were in North Adamsville, Mechanicsville or whatever ville you were from, for a while.

So that night was the introduction to the large economy size search for the freedom we all, as it turned out, were looking for. I remember saying to Sweet Pea as we went back to our campsite (and wishing I wasn’t so square about messing with another guy’s girl, and maybe she was too, maybe wishing I wasn’t so square about it) that we had turned a corner that night and that we had best play it out right then for the chance might not come again.

The next day, no, the next night because I had spent the day working up to it, I became “Far-Out” Phil, or the start of that Phil. Frankly, to not bore you with a pipe by pipe description of the quantity of dope that I smoked (herb, hashish, a little cocaine, more exotic and hard to get then than it became later) or ingested (a tab of mescaline) that day, I was “wasted.” Hell I am getting “high” now just thinking about how high I was that day. By nightfall I was ready for almost anything as that weird music that crept up your spine got hold of me. I just, as somebody put a match to the wood to start the cooking of a tonight pot of stew to keep us from malnutrition, started dancing by myself. Phil Larkin, formerly foul-mouthed Phil, a cagey, edgy guy from deep in corner boy, wise guy, hang-out guy, never ask a girl to dance but just kind of mosey up world started dancing by myself. But not for long because then he, me, took that dance to some other level, some level that I can only explain by example. Have you ever seen Oliver Stone’s film, The Doors, the one that traces the max-daddy rocker of the late 1960s night, Jim Morrison’s career from garage band leader to guru? One of the scenes at one of the outdoor concerts, in a canyon somewhere I think, had him, head full of dope, practically transformed into a shaman. Ya, one of those Indian (Markin: Native American, Phil] religious leaders who did a trance-dance. That was me in late May of 1966, if you can believe that.

And see, although I wasn’t conscious of it first I was being joined by one of the women on the bus, Luscious Lois, whom I had met, in passing, the night before. This Lois, not her real name, as you can tell not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. [Markin: Nice point, Phil, although I already ‘stole’ that point from you before.] Her real name was Sandra Sharp, a college girl from Vassar who, taking some time off from school, was “on the bus” trying to find herself. She was like some delicate flower, a dahlia maybe, like I had never encountered before. I won’t bore you with the forever have to tell what she looked like thing because that is not what made her, well, intriguing, maddeningly intriguing, like some femme fatale in a crime noir film that Markin, from what I can gather, is always running on about. She was pretty, no question, maybe even a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty if it came to a fair description in the light of day but what made her fetching, enchanting, if that is a different way to say it, was the changes in her facial expressions as she danced, and danced provocatively, dance half-nakedly, around my desire. And I danced, shedding my shirt although I do not remember doing so, and danced half-naked around her desire. Then, faintly like a buzz from some hovering insects, maybe bees, and then more loudly I kept hearing the on-lookers, half-mad with dope and with desire themselves, yelling far out, far out. And Far-Out Phil was born.

Oh, as for Luscious Lois and her desire, well, you figure it out. I might not have been wise to the ways of the Vassar world in those days when such places were bastions to place the young women of the elite and keep them away from clawing upstarts from the corner boy night as I should have been but the rest of my time on the bus was spend hovering around Lois, and keeping other guys away. I even worked some plebeian “magic” on her one night when I started using certain swear words in her ear that worked for me with every Sunday after Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Millie Callahan, back in the day. Far-Out Phil got a little something extra that night, proper Vassar girl or not.

No offense against Iowa, well only a little offense for not being near an ocean, I think. No offense against the university there, well only a little offense for not being Berkeley, but after about a week of that campsite and its environs I was ready to move on and it did not matter if it was with Flip-Flop and his crowd or with Captain Crunch (the guy who “led” his merry pranksters, real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia, Class of 1958 who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of taking the ride). Captain Crunch, as befitted his dignity (and since it was “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, from what I heard), was merely the “leader” here.

The driving was left to another guy. This driver was not your mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she was driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west) but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one noticed those bumps (or else was so stoned, drug or music-stoned, that those things passed like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Haverford College Class of ’64, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And Cruising was, being just a little older, and about one hundred years more experienced, was also weary, very weary of co-eds, copping dope and, frankly, staying in one place for so long. He also wanted to see his girlfriend or his wife, I am not sure which, in Denver so I knew that was where we were heading. So off we go, let’s get going.

And the passengers. Nobody from the Flip-Flop Express (although Flip-Flop, as usual lived up to his name and hemmed and hawed about it), they were heading back east, back into the dark Mechanicsville night. I tried, tried like hell, to get Sweet Pea to come along just in case the thing with Lois fell apart or she took some other whim into her head. See, re-invented or not, I still had some all-the-angles boyhood rust hanging on me. We knew for sure that Casey was driving, and was still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake had not hit yet, or maybe he really was superman. Others whose names I remember: Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), Captain Crunch’s girl friend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice, not his, and he was not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” had monikers like Silver City Slim, Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he told it), Denver Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also had real names that indicated that they were from somewhere that had nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. They were also, or almost all were, twenty-somethings that had some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not. And they were all either searching or, like the Captain, were at a stage where they were just hooked into taking the ride.

As for the rest. Well, no one could be exactly sure, by the time the bus approached the outskirts of Denver, as this was strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Wyoming, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town pokey. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music is not for everyone. And while we had plenty of adventures on those strange day roads winding up the crest of the rockies to Denver, thinking back on it now, they all came down to drugs, sex, and rock and roll, with a little food on the side.

Well, except that one time, camping on a primitive clearing, not really a campsite, not a commercial site, no way, near ranch land in some Wyoming Podunk we got the hell scared out of us by some ranchers, some nasty-looking cowboys. Three or four but that was all it took, if you to want to know the truth, who moseyed (and that is exactly the right word because this was THEIR god’s country and moseying was just exactly the way you moved when that hard fact was involved. No city scratching and scrambling to claim your little corner, not for these boys). We could see they were armed, armed to the teeth, not on the off-hand chance they would run into some merry prankster dangers, but carrying that full array of armament was just their normal work conditions, god’s country or not.

This is one time that Captain Crunch really showed his mettle, and acted as an upfront leader. Most of the time he was in a running battle with Mustang Sally over who she was, or was not, sleeping with or he was just controlling the action of the bus indirectly. One maneuver was to always, always, slip off to Cruising any questions about where we were headed or could we stop here or there to see some long lost friend, some scenic view, or any one of a thousand things that come up on a prankster trip, or as I found out later even a square’s kiddies–laden family trip. Straight up Captain, who was not skinny guy and was probably pretty well built before he started his prankster gig although there was some sag now, yelled at the top of his lungs, “You, boys hungry?, We’ve got plenty of stew if you are.” Well, for always lean times, eating from the hip cowboys the idea of having plenty to eat right there in front of you must have been appealing. But the lead cowboy, Joe Bob Buck, was his name, I swear, said in that slow drawl Sam Shepard way, “Nope, but we heard that you guys had some decent dope. Is that straight?” Well, of course that was straight. And in a flash a big pipe of the Captain’s finest was heading Joe Bob’s way. Hey, I guess this was a dope story after all so, ya, I guess it did all come down to just drugs, sex, and rock and roll. But if you want to know what the sixties were about a little if you just think about a clan of hippies sharing a pipe of high-grade Panama with some lonesome cowboys out in Podunk Wyoming and thought nothing of it then you have got the idea.

Oh, sure, we also had our share of “casualties” of war and basket-cases on that trip. It wasn’t all cowboy peace and rockies vistas. I remember, more than once, we had to leave people behind in various emergency rooms suffering from anything from a “bad trip” to normal medical problems or make that call home that spelled the end of the road for some half-dazed kid. Come pick up the wreckage, mom and dad. The worst was some poor bedraggled girl, who probably should not have been allowed to stay because she was a little wacky coming in, who we picked up near some rural bus stop. Captain had a big heart on this “on the bus” question, and unless you proved to be some kind of thief, or something like that you stayed if you wanted to. Anyway this young woman, hardly more than a girl, just started screaming one day, no drugs involved that we knew of , just started creaming and even Captain and Sally couldn’t stop her. We left her in Cheyenne but like a lot of things from that transient time I never did find out what happened to her. Just like some people can’t live in the high altitudes not everybody could survive on the bus. Living out on edge city, and no question we all were, maybe not 24/7 but enough to know that city was our home, is a high wire act and not for the faint of heart.

We, the core of Captain Crunch’s crew anyway, stayed in Denver for a while, for as long as it took Cruising to have his "fill" (his word) of his wife, or girlfriend, or maybe both and was ready to hit the road again. As fall approached the time was the time and we started heading west again, well southwest because Cruising did not want to get catch up in some rockies October whiteout and the rest of us wanted to get the warmth of some desert sun under our skins. Most of us, including me who had never been west of New York City and then just for a moment, had never seen the desert although we all, children of the television 1950s, had ‘seen’ it on the screen in the Westerns. So we were all pumped for desert stones, desert “stones,” and seeking the ghost of the lost tribes, the lost tribes whose shamanic powers has us in thrall. I, personally, was looking forward to investigating some ghost-dancing that I had heard about in Denver and which, as I became more drug-steady, I was dying to “see” a vision of off some wayward canyon wall before some blazing fire evoking dream-trance images.

And so Cruising did his merry prankster bus magic (he really was some zen master with that damn bus, especially for a college guy, and especially when we hit some tough spots where the damn thing would give out and he would “breathe” live back into the thing, like, well, like some zen master). A one time example will suffice. We were heading to Gallup, New Mexico in the heart of Indian country [Markin; Native American, Phil], maybe fifty miles away and not really close to anything like a full-service gas station, when the clutch seized, just seized. Nada, nunca, nada, nothing as we used to say in our corner boy days. Cruising gets out, opens the hood, fools around with this and that and maybe forty-five minutes later we are on the road again. And whatever he did, whatever zen thing he had with that fickle bus, lasted all the way until we hit La Jolla and he had the whole thing worked on. Magic. Captain Crunch mapped out our itinerary and the rest of us got the bus travel-ready, travel-ready being a good cleaning, a re-ordering of the mattresses, and a checking out (and chucking off) of what was necessary and what was not for the trip westward, westward down to New Mexico first.

The desert was all that it was cracked up to be except, being the fall it wasn’t as hot as Cruising said it was when he went through various times in the early or late summer (mid-summer, as I later found out, forget about even in the cooler high desert, low desert, Death Valley desert, forget about you, abandon all ye who enter), the Grand Canyon magnificent, if overused even then, and after that the high desert in California. By then I was getting homesick, no, not homesick for North Adamsville (that would not come until many, many years later), but for my homeland, the sea. I hadn’t been away from an ocean breeze for that long ever and so I missed it. And out in that high desert, high Joshua Tree, Twenty-Nine Palms desert I started to “smell” the ocean. I now had some “rank” on the bus, some say in what we did, or didn’t do, and the Captain liked me, or liked the idea that a working-class kid with some brains and some thoughts (mostly stuff “cribbed” from what Markin use to talk about in those sometimes long, seemingly boring Salducci’s Pizza parlor corner boy nights but it went over, if you can believe that) was traveling along side him. So when I started my “campaign” to head to the ocean, and gained some allies, especially Lois, just then, going under the name Lupe Matin, I think, and Mustang Sally and, most importantly, Cruising didn’t raise an objection I was home free. Come on, let’s get moving.

We wound up in La Jolla, after a few weeks of stopping here and there to see people the Captain (or Sally) wanted to see in Los Angeles ( I never called it LA or La-La Land then just Los Angeles, city of angels) and down in Laguna. Needless to say the Pacific Ocean around La Jolla, and places like that, made our East Coast puddles look sick. La Jolla- English translation, surfers’ paradise, says it all. But the two most important things about La Jolla were that, after months of bus life, we finally were settled in a “pad.” [Markin: house, in this case, or rather something like an ocean view semi-estate owned by some wealthy drug lord known to the Captain, according to the way Phil told it.] Real toilets, real showers, real fireplaces, real everything. Nice, very nice for a poor old working- class boy who a few months earlier was scratching for change to give dear mother some rent for his two by four room. This was to be our winter quarters (and as it turned out spring one as well) and all we had to do was act as caretakers, not real caretakers, like servants, but just make sure nobody stole the family silverware, stole the place, or decided to “squat” there.

This was also where important thing number two came in. Walking along the rock-strewn cove in front of downtown La Jolla, is where I met Butterfly Swirl, my blonde-haired, blue-eyed angel who was just sixteen at the time, a high school student from up in Carlsbad. She was down in La Jolla trying to “find” herself while tagging along with her boyfriend, some eternally blonde, blue-eyed surfer guy from Del Mar, christ. Just then said surfer boy was out looking for the perfect wave, or something, and so I invited Butterfly Swirl (real name, Kathleen Clarke, Carlsbad High School Class of 1968) over to La Grande (the name of the estate, hell, they all had names like that) to smoke a little dope. She brightened at that.

Well, of course, I could see where this was heading, if it was heading anywhere what with my one girl-one guy rule (although I admit, admit now not then, now that I think the statute of limitations is probably over on lying to 1967 girlfriends, I went astray a couple of times in Denver and Joshua Tree but those weren’t really girlfriend-worthy trysts). I brought her home, anyway. We had some dope, and had some sex. Simple. And just when I thought I had her safely out the door (literally and figuratively) Lupe stepped into the room. Instead of exploding though, after checking out Butterfly with a bemused look, she said, “Is she staying?” And before I could get word one out Butterfly chirped out, “Yes.” And Lupe said, “Good” in a kind of distracted way. The new age had dawned, praise be. But that was later. Then I just said out loud to no one in particular, “Damn women, I will never figure them out.” And I never have. [Markin: Brother Phil you are preaching to the choir on that one.] That is why, when we headed north for the rumored summer of love in San Francisco a month or so later, I had my angel-devil girlfriends, my “family” as Captain Crunch called them, with me."

Now you are filled in on the what and the why of Phil’s being on that nameless San Francisco hill mentioned a while back. A nameless hill, nameless to first time ‘Frisco Phil, although maybe not to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland, the sea, out in the bay working it way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away. Right then though a tall young man, well taller than Phil, lanky, maybe not as lanky as Phil with his drug stews diet having taken some pounds off, and some desire for pounds as well, dressed in full “hippie” regalia (army jacket, blue jeans, bandanna headband to keep his head from exploding, striped flannel shirt against the cold bay winds, against the cold bay winds even in summer, and nighttime colds too, and now that we are on the West Coast, roman sandals) walked up the street that paralleled the hill the entourage was then planted on, cast a glance as that company, nodded slightly, and then turned around and asked to no one in particular but kind of zeroing in on Butterfly, “Got some dope, for a hungry brother?” Except for shorter hair, which only meant that this traveler had either not been on the road very long or had just recently caught the “finding himself” bug he could have been Phil’s brother, biological brother.

That line, that single line, could have been echoed a thousand times, maybe ten thousand times, that day along a thousand hills (well maybe not that many in San Fran), aimed at any small clot of like minded spirits. And Phil sensing that just that one sentence spoke of kindred said, “Sure, a little Columbia Red for the head, okay?” And so started the long, well hippie long, 1960s long anyway, relationship between one Phillip Larkin and one Joshua Breslin (a.k.a. Prince Love, although don’t hold it against him now if you know, or have seen, Josh lately). And the women, of course.

And, of course, as well was that sense that Far Out had that he and Prince Love were kindred was based on the way that the prince posed that first question. His accent spoke, spoke hard of New England, not Boston but farther north. And once the pipe had been passed a couple of times and the heat of day started getting everybody a little talkative then Josh spilled out his story. Yes, he was from Olde Saco, Maine, born and bred, a working class kid whose family had worked the town mills for a couple of generations, maybe more, but times were getting hard, real hard in those northern mill towns now that the mill-owners had got the big idea to head south and get some cheaper labor, real cheap. So Joshua, after he graduated from high school a few weeks before decided, on a whim (not really a whim though), to head west and check out prospects here on the coast. Josh finished up his story by saying, “And here I am a few weeks later sitting on Russian Hill smoking righteous dope and sitting with some sweet ladies. (Markin: Phil never said what his reaction to that last part was which seemed, the way it was spoken, spoken by Phil in the re-telling, filled with menace. Girl-taking menace. Well, old corner boy Phil menace, hell Markin menace too, would have felt that way but maybe in that hazed-out summer it just passed by like so much air) Everybody else giggled now that they knew the name of this hill that they had been trying to guess the name of for the last half hour when he blurted that out. Naturally Phil, a kingly road warrior now, whatever his possible misgivings, invited Josh to stay with them, seeing as they were practically neighbors back home. Josh was “family” now, and Butterfly seemed gladder than the others of that fact.

But enough of old-time visions, of old time rites of passage, and of foundling dreams. Phil, and his entourage (nice word, huh, no more girlfriend solo, or as here paired, lovingly paired, to be hung up about, just go with the flow). Phil, Butterfly, hell, even jaded Lilly Rose (formerly known as Luscious Lois in case you forgot, or we not paying attention), and now Prince Love, are a “family,” or rather part of the Captain Crunch extended intentional family of merry pranksters. [Markin: Small case, so as not to be confused with their namesakes and models legendary mad man writer Ken Kesey and his La Honda Merry Pranksters, okay] Just yesterday they hit ‘Frisco and had planted their de rigueur day-glo bus in the environs of Golden Gate Park after many months on the road west, and some sitting down time down south in La Jolla. Hearing the siren call buzzing all spring they have now advanced north to feast on the self-declared Summer of Love that is guaranteed to mend broken hearts, broken spirits, broken rainbows, broken china, and broken, well broken everything. The glue: drug, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, although not just any old-timey be-bop fifties rock and roll but what everybody now calls “acid” rock. And acid, for the squares out there, is nothing but the tribal name for LSD that has every parent from the New York island to the Redwood forests, every public official from ‘Frisco to France, and every police officer (I am being nice here and will not use the oink word) from the Boston to Bombay and back, well, “freaked out” (and clueless). Yes, our Phil has come a long way from that snarly wise guy corner boy night of that old town he lammed out from (according to his told story) just about a year ago.

Or had he? Well, sure Phil’s hair was quite a bit longer, his beard less wispy and more manly, his tattered work boots and later Chuck Taylor sneakers transformed into sensible (West Coast ocean sensible) roman sandals and his weight, well, his weight was way down from those weekly bouts with three-day drug escape, and fearful barely eaten four-in-the-morning open hearth stews, and not much else. And as he sat on that Russian Hill looking out into that bay with his brood he could not even look forward, as he originally planned, to the expectation of just trying LSD for the hell of it in ‘Frisco, having licked it (off a blotter), or drank it (the famous, or infamous, kool-aid fix), several times down in La Jolla. In those lazy hazy days watching the surf (and surfers) splashing against the Pacific world with blond-haired, blue-eyed, bouncy Butterfly, and the raven-haired, dark as night-eyed Lilly Rose, or both listening to the music fill the night air. Not square music either (anything pre-1964 except maybe some be-bop wild piano man Jerry Lee Lewis, or some Chicago blues guitar fired by Muddy Waters or microphone-eating Howlin’ Wolf), but moog, boog, foog-filled music.

Just that Russian Hill minute though, and to be honest, while in the midst of another acid trip (LSD, for the squares just in case you forgot), Phil sensed that something had crested in the approaching blue-pink Pacific night and that just maybe this scene would not evolve into the “newer world” that everybody, especially Captain Crunch, kept expecting any day. Worst, now that he knew that he couldn’t, no way, go back to some department store clerk’s job, some picket-fenced white house with dog, two point three children, and a wife what was to happen to him when Butterfly, Lilly Rose, Joshua, and even Captain Crunch “find” themselves and go back to school, home, academic careers, or whatever. For now though he will just take it all.
***********
The End Lyrics
The Doors
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land

Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold

The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we'll do the rest

The blue bus is callin' us
The blue bus is callin' us
Driver, where you taken' us

The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother...I want to...fuck you

C'mon baby, take a chance with us
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin' a blue rock
On a blue bus
Doin' a blue rock
C'mon, yeah

Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

It hurts to set you free
But you'll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die

This is the end

My Lesson in Mindfulness By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2011 (Or Songs To Aging Children, Ouch! AARP- Worthy Brothers and Sisters-Markin )

My Lesson in Mindfulness By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2011

In 1979, my life changed while I was covering the trial of Dan White for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Former police officer White had confessed to killing the progressive Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, who was becoming the gay equivalent of Martin Luther King. Now psychiatrist Martin Blinder was testifying that, on the night before the murders, White “just sat there in front of the TV set, binging on Twinkies.” Another psychiatrist stated, “If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place.”

In my notebook, I scribbled “the Twinkie defense” and wrote about it in my next report. On the 25th anniversary of those murders, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that, “During the trial, no one but well-known satirist Paul Krassner -- who may have coined the phrase ‘Twinkie defense’ -- played up that angle.”

The Twinkie defense rested comfortably between a severely bungled prosecution and a shrewdly manipulated defense. One juror remarked after the trial, “It sounded like Dan White had hypoglycemia.” The “diminished capacity” ploy had worked. And so it came to pass that a double political assassination was transmuted into simple voluntary manslaughter. White would be sentenced to serve only seven years behind bars. No wonder there was a post-verdict riot in front of City Hall.

A dozen police cars had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring the angry shouts from a mob of five thousand understandably outraged gays. The police were running amuck in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming profanity-laden homophobic epithets.

I was struck with a nightstick on the outside of my right knee and I fell to the ground. Another cop came charging at me and made a threatening gesture with his billy club. When I tried to protect my head, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my chest. Oh, God, the pain! It felt like an electric cattle prod was stuck between my ribs.

I had a fractured rib and a punctured lung. The injuries affected my posture, and I began to develop an increasingly unbalanced body -- twisted and in constant pain. I limped the gamut of therapists: from an orthodox orthopedic surgeon who gave me a shot of cortisone to ease the pain; to a specialist in neuromuscular massage who wondered if the cop had gone to medical school because “he knew exactly where to hit” me with his billy club; to a New Age healer who put one hand on my stomach, held the receptionist's hand with the other, and asked her whether I should wear a brace. The answer was yes.

But I decided to get a second opinion -- perhaps from another receptionist.

In 1987, I went to a chiropractor, who referred me to a podiatrist, who referred me to a physiatrist, who wanted me to get an MRI -- a CAT scan -- in order to rule out the possibility of cervical stenosis. But the MRI ruled it in. X-rays indicated that my spinal cord was being squeezed by spurring on the inside of several discs in my neck.

The physiatrist told me that I needed surgery. I panicked. I had always taken my good health for granted. I went into heavy denial, confident that I could completely cure my problem by walking barefoot on the beach every day for three weeks.

“You're a walking time bomb,” the podiatrist warned me. He said that if I were in a rear-end collision, or just out strolling and I tripped, my spinal cord could be severed, and I would be paralyzed from the chin down. I began to be conscious of every move I made. I was living, not one day at a time, not one hour at a time, not one minute at a time -- I was living one second at a time.

The head of orthopedics at UCLA assured me that I really had no choice but to have the operation. I asked if I could have avoided this whole situation with a different diet or by exercising more. He shook his head no. “Wrong parents,” he said, referring to hereditary arthritis.

My condition had been totally exacerbated by the police beating. I was one of 37 million Americans who didn't have insurance, nor did I have any savings. Fortunately, I had an extended family and friends all over the country who came to my financial rescue. The operation was scheduled to take place at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York.

A walking time bomb! I was still in a state of shock, but since I perceived the world through a filter of absurdity, now I would have to apply that perception to my own situation. The breakthrough for me came when I learned that my neurosurgeon moonlighted as a clown at the circus. “All right, I surrender, I surrender.”

I met him the night before the operation. He sat on my bed wearing a trench coat and called me Mr. Krassner. I thought that if he was going to cut me open and file through five discs in my upper spinal column, he could certainly be informal enough to call me Paul. He was busy filling out a chart.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Krassner?”

“I'm a writer and a comedian.”

“How do you spell comedian?”

Rationally, I knew that you don't have to be a good speller to be a fine surgeon, but his question made me uneasy. At least his hands weren't shaking while he wrote. Then he told me about how simple the operation was and he mentioned almost in passing that there was always the possibility I could end up staying in the hospital for the rest of my life. Huh? There was a time when physicians practiced positive thinking to help their patients, but now it was a requirement of malpractice prevention to provide the worst-case scenario in advance.

The next morning, under the influence of Valium and Demerol, I could see that my neurosurgeon had just come from the circus, because he was wearing a clown costume, with a big round red nose over his surgical mask. He couldn't get close to the operating table because his shoes were so large, and when he had to cleanse my wound he asked the nurse to please pass the seltzer bottle...

“Wake up, Paul," the anesthesiologist, said, “Surgery's over. Wiggle your toes.”

My wife Nancy was waiting in the hall, and I was never so glad to see her smile. That evening, at a benefit in Berkeley, my friend, novelist and Merry Pranksters leader Ken Kesey, told the audience, “I spoke with Krassner today, and the operation was successful, but he says he's not taking any painkillers because he never does any legal drugs.”

Then Kesey led the crowd in a chant: “Get well, Paul! Get well, Paul!” And it worked. The following month I was performing again, wearing a neck brace at a theater in Seattle.

But, over the years, I gradually got gimpier and gimpier. My hip was so out of kilter that my right foot turned inward when I walked, and my left foot continuously was tripping on my right foot. More and more often, I found myself falling all over the place. Dozens of times. Finally, after I started inadvertently knocking down other people like dominoes at a book festival in Australia, I realized that I would definitely need to start walking with a cane.

Since then, at any airport, I have to put my cane on the conveyor belt, along with my carry-on bag and my shoes. And then the security guy hands me a different cane -- a wooden one, painted orange -- to help me walk through the metal detector without falling.

One time, in a restaurant, I tripped on my own cane and fell flat on my face -- bruising myself badly, yet grateful that I hadn’t broken any teeth. That’s my nature -- to perceive a blessing in disguise as soon as I stop bleeding. However, this time I was left with a dark, square-shaped scab between my nose and my lips. It looked like a Hitler mustache, and I became very self-conscious about it.

I will be 80 years old in April 2012, and now I really am a walking time bomb. I cannot afford to fall again. I must be careful when I walk. I have to be fully conscious of every step. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Any fall could injure me. It might even be fatal. I have surrendered to a process that is truly an ongoing lesson in mindfulness. I’m learning that when you are mindful in one aspect of your life, you’ll strengthen mindfulness in other aspects.

I am, after all, a Zen Bastard -- a title bestowed upon me when Kesey and I co-edited The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog -- and I certainly have no desire to trip while hobbling along my particular path.

[Paul Krassner published the satirical magazine, The Realist (1958-2001). His latest book is an expanded edition of his memoir, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, available at paulkrassner.com. In 2010, the writers’ organization PEN honored him with their Lifetime Achievement Award. “I’m very happy to receive this award,” he announced, “and I’m even happier that it’s not posthumous.” Read more articles by Paul Krassner on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 8:39 AM

***“You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Mad Hatter Writer Ken Kesey And His 1960s Merry Pranksters In Mind

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters

Peter Paul Markin comment:

Everybody, well everybody who checks things out here, or on other sites that I am associated with, knows that I am dedicated to swapping lies about the old days. The old days in this case being the 1960s, and more specifically the 1960s old time corner boy days in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville, my growing-up working class hometown. And, of course, if one wants to swap lies about those old days, or any days, then one needs a, well, foil, or foils. Needless to say, via the “miracle” of the Internet, in its various manifestations, all one has to do is latch onto some search engine, type in “corner boys,” “North Adamsville,” or some such combinations and, like lemmings from the sea, our homeland the sea, every surviving corner boy with enough energy to lift his stubby little fingers will be on your screen before you can say, well, say, be-bop night.

Frankie Riley, our lord and chieftain was the first, although he has lost much speed in his pitch since the old days. I won’t bore you with the details of his “exploits.” You can fumble through the archives here for that. Nor will I speak of fast-talking Johnny Silver, except to point out that he is the culprit, there is no other way to put it, who started the sexual revolution. No, no the real one that started with “the pill” in the early 1960s and continues through to today with the struggle for women’s liberation, liberation from all kinds of second-class citizen stuff from jobs and wages to help with childcare and housework. No, Johnny started the AARP-version of the sexual revolution-old geezers looking for love, looking for love in all the wrong places, if you ask me but nobody is, asking that is. Those gripping tales can also be found in the archives here.

All of this, of course, is prelude to the real subject here. Phil Larkin’s transformation from corner boy “Foul-Mouth” Phil (and he really was, as he would tell you in that moment of candor that he is occasionally capable of) in early 1960s North Adamsville to “Far-Out” Phil on one of the ubiquitous Merry Prankster-inspired converted yellow brick road school buses that dotted the highways and by-ways of the American be-bop heading west night from about the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s (maybe a little earlier in the ‘70s). (For those too young to know, those who have forgotten, and those who have conveniently feigned forgetfulness just in case some statute of limitations has not run out I have placed a link above to a Wikipedia entry for the Merry Pranksters with this post.)

When last we hear from Phil he was heading to Pennsylvania to meet up with some doctoral program research addict whom he “met” on Facebook. That tale, ah, can also be found in the archives here. However, unlike these seemingly endless “haunting the Internet” schoolboy antics from guys old enough, well I am no snitch, so let’s say old enough to know better, looking for the fountain of youth, or whatever this Phil transformation story actually interests me. And so here it is. As usual I edited it lightly but it is Phil’s story, and I am pleased to say a good one.
*********

Phil Larkin here. Jesus, The Scribe [Markin: Like I warned the other guys, Phil, watch on that scribe, or The Scribe thing] actually liked this idea of me telling about riding the, what did he call it, oh ya, the yellow brick road bus, back in my prankster days [Markin: Just to keep things straight, since Phil still likes to play a little rough with the truth, not the famous Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters bus made famous through Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but certainly inspired by it]. I barely got by with my stories about real stuff that people want to read like the trials and tribulations of an older guy trying to “hook-up” with the ladies on what amounted to a sexless sex site and my rendezvous with Amy (and she is not a research addict, Markin, no way, although she is an addict another way but you don’t want to hear that real stuff story), my lovely sociology doctoral student down at Penn State (Go, Nittany Lions!). But he is all over, all f—king over, some little bit of “cultural history” stuff that nobody, except AARP-guys (and dolls) would do anything but yawn over. And those AARP-guys (and dolls) are too busy trying to “hook-up,” to grab some sex before is too late to spent more than two seconds on ancient history. So this one is strictly for The, oops, Peter Paul Markin.

What got the whole memory lane thing started was that somewhere Markin picked up, probably second-hand off of Amazon if I know him, a CD from Time-Life Music entitled something like Shakin’ It Up: 1966. Now the music on the compilation, the music in the post-British invasion, heart of acid rock night, was strictly for laughs. But the artwork on the cover (as Markin told me was true on other CDs in this expansive classic rock 'n' roll era series) featured nothing more, or nothing less, than a day-glo bus right out of my prankster days, complete with some very odd residents (odd now, not then, then they were righteous, and maybe, just maybe still are). That scene gave us a couple of hours conversation one night and jogged my memory about a lot of things. Especially about what Markin, hell, me too, called the search of the great American freedom night. (He put some colors, blue-pink like just before dark, dark out West anyway, in his but we, for once. were on the same page.)

Naturally, Markin as is his wont [Markin: “Wont” is my word not Phil’s. His, I prefer, strongly prefer, to not to post], once he played the CD and played me for information (I know this guy, remember) ran off like a bunny and wrote his version as part of a review of the CD. Of course, being, well, being Markin he got it about half-right. So let me tell the story true and you can judge who plays “rough” with the truth.

Markin at least had it just about right when he described that old bus:

“A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s, come flame or flash-out. Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma”-ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as the search for the great blue-pink American Western night.”

“Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo splashes, and zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware and nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffel bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean. Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop night you could take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you could find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high- grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically.”

That says it all pretty much about the physical characteristics of the bus but not much about how I got on the damn thing. Frankly, things were pretty tough around my house, things like no having much of a job after high school just working as a dead-ass retail clerk up at Raymond’s Department Store in Adamsville Plaza. Not really, according to dear mother, with dear old dad chiming in very once in a while especially when I didn’t come up with a little room and board money, being motivated to “better myself,” and being kind of drift-less with my Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys long gone off to college, the service, or married, stuff like that. Then too I was having some girl trouble, no, not what you think girl baby trouble just regular the battle of the sexes stuff when my honey, Ginny McCabe, practically shut me off because I didn’t want to get married just then. But I knew something was in the air, something was coming like “the scribe” was always predicting. [Markin: I'll let that small case scribe pass, Phil] And for once I wanted in on that. But the specific reason that I split in the dead of the North Adamsville night was that I was trying to avoid the military draft, now that the war in Vietnam was escalating with nowhere else to go. I knew my days were numbered and while I was as patriotic (and still am, unlike that parlor pinko, commie, Markin) as the next guy (and these days, girls) I was not ready to lay down my life out in the boondocks right then. So I headed out on the lam.

[Markin: Phil, as he related this part of the story that night, had me all choked up about his military plight and I was ready to say brother, welcome to the anti-imperialist resistance. Then I realized, wait a minute, Phil was 4-F (meaning he was not eligible for drafting for military service due to some medical or psychological condition in those days for those who do not know the reference. A prima facie example, I might add, of that playing rough with the truth I warned you about before.]

Hey, I am no slave to convention, whatever the conventions are, but in those days I looked like a lot of young guys. Longish hair, a beard, a light beard at the time, blue jeans, an army jacket, sunglasses, a knapsack over my shoulder, and work boots on my feet.(Sandals would not come until later when I got off the road and was settled in a “pad” [Markin: house, rented or maybe abandoned, apartment, hovel, back of a “free” church, back of a store, whatever, a place to rest those weary bones, or “crash”] in La Jolla and were, in any case, not the kind of footwear that would carry you through on those back road places you might find yourself in, places like Deadwood, Nevada at three in the morning with a ten-mile walk to the nearest town in front of you). I mention all this because that “look” gave me the cache to make it on the road when I headed out of the house that Spring 1966 be-bop night after one final argument with dear mother about where I was going, what was I going to do when I got there, and what was I going to do for money. Standard mother fare then, and now I suppose.

So short on dough, and long on nerve and fearlessness, then I started to hitchhike with the idea of heading west to California like about eight million people, for about that same number of reasons, have been heading there since the Spanish, or one of those old-time traveling by boat nations, heard about the place. Of course, nowadays I would not think to do such a thing in such a dangerous world, unless I was armed to the teeth and that would take a little edge off that “seeking the newer world” Markin has been blabbing about since about 1960. But then, no problem, let’s get going. Especially no problem when just a few miles into my journey a Volkswagen mini-bus (or van, neither in the same league as the yellow brick road school bus, no way, that I will tell you about later but okay for a long ride, and definitely okay when you are in some nowhere, nowhere Nebraska maybe, back road, hostile territory dominate by squares, squares with guns and other evil implements and they, the VW-ites, stoned, stoned to the heavens stop to ask you directions because they are “lost” and invite you on board) stopped on Route 128, backed up, and a guy who looked a lot like me, along with two pretty young girls says, “where are you heading?” (Okay, okay, Markin, young women, alright.) West, just west. And then the beautified words, “Hop in.”

Most of the road until the Midwest, Iowa is the Midwest right, was filled with short little adventures like that. A mini-van frolic for a few hours, or a few days. Maybe a few short twenty-miles non-descript rides in between but heading west by hook or by crook. Did I like it? Sure I did although I was pretty much an up-tight working class guy (that was what one of those pretty girls I just mentioned called me when I “passed” on smoking a joint and, hell, she was from next door Clintondale for chrissakes) who liked his booze, a little sex {Markin: Phil, come on now, a little?], and just hanging around the old town waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I could see, after a few drug experiences, no, not LSD, that I was starting to dig the scene. And I felt every day that I was out of North Adamsville that I was finally shaking off the dust from that place.

Then one night, sitting in the front seat of a big old Pontiac (not everybody, not every “hip” everybody had the mini-bus, van or school bus handy for their “search” for the great American night), Big Bang Jane between us, the Flip-Flop Kid driving like god’s own mad driver, smoking a joint, laughing with the couple of in back, Bopper Billy and Sweet Pea, we headed into a pay-as- you go roadside camp near Ames out in Iowa. And at that campsite parked maybe five or six places over from where we planted ourselves was god’s own copy of that day-glo merry prankster bus I mentioned before. I flipped out because while I had hear about, and seen from a distance, such contraptions I hadn’t been up close to one before. Wow!

After we settled in, the Flip-Flop Kid (and the guy really could never make up his mind about anything, anything except don’t go too close to Big Bang Jane, no kidding around on that, no sir), Bopper Billy (who really thought he was king of the be-bop night, but, hell in the North Adamsville corner boy night Frankie Riley, hell, maybe even Markin, would have out be-bopped him for lunch and had time for a nap), Big Bang Jane (guess what that referred to, and she gave herself that nickname, but I never tried to make a move on her because she was just a little too wild, a little too I would have to keeping looking over my shoulder for me then, probably later too when things got even looser. And then there was the Flip-Flop Kid’s warning ), and Sweet Pea (and she was a sweet pea, if Bopper Billy wasn’t around, well we both agreed there was something there but in those 1966 days we were still half tied up with the old conventions of not breaking in between a guy and his girl, well that was the convention anyway whether it was generally honored or not, I did) we headed over once we heard the vibes from the sound system churning out some weird sounds, something like we had never heard before (weird then, little did we know that this was the wave of the future, for a few years anyway).

Naturally, well naturally after the fact once we learned what the inhabitants of the bus were about, they invited us for supper, or really to have some stew from a big old pot cooking on a fireplace that came with the place. And if you didn’t want the hell-broth stew then you could partake of some rarefied dope (no, again, no on the LSD thing. It was around, it was around on the bus too, among its various denizens, but mainly it was a rumor, and more of a West Coast thing just then. In the self-proclaimed, tribal self-proclaimed Summer of Love of 1967, and after that, is when the acid hit, and when I tried it but not on this trip. This trip was strictly weed, hemp, joint, mary jane, marijuana, herb, whatever you wanted to called that stuff that got you high, got you out of yourself, and got you away from what you were in North Adamsville, Mechanicsville or whatever ville you were from, for a while.

So that night was the introduction to the large economy size search for the freedom we all, as it turned, out were looking for. I remember saying to Sweet Pea as we went back to our campsite (and wishing I wasn’t so square about messing with another guy’s girl, and maybe she was too, maybe wishing I wasn’t square about it) that we had turned a corner that night and that we had best play it out all the way to the end right then for the chance might not come again.

The next day, no, the next night because I had spent the day working up to it, I became “Far-Out” Phil, or the start of that Phil. Frankly, to not bore you with a pipe by pipe description of the quantity of dope that I smoked (herb, hashish, a little cocaine, more exotic and hard to get then than it became later) or ingested (a tab of mescaline) that day, I was “wasted.” Hell I am getting “high” now just thinking about how high I was that day. By nightfall I was ready for almost anything as that weird music that crept up your spine got hold of me. I just, as somebody put a match to the wood to start the cooking of tonight pot of stew to keep us from malnutrition, started dancing by myself. Phil Larkin, formerly foul-mouthed Phil, a cagey, edgy guy from deep in corner boy, wise guy, hang-out guy, never ask a girl to dance but just kind of mosey up world, started dancing by himself. But not for long because then he, me, took that dance to some other level, some level that I can only explain by example. Have you ever seen Oliver Stone’s film, The Doors, the one that traced the max-daddy rocker of the late 1960s night Jim Morrison’s career from garage band leader to guru? One of the scenes at one of the concerts, an outdoor, maybe desert outdoor one, had him, head full of dope, practically transformed into a shaman. Ya, one of those Indian (Markin: Native American, Phil] religious leaders who did a trance-dance. That was me in late May of 1966, if you can believe that.

And see, although I wasn’t conscious of it first I was being joined by one of the women on the bus, Luscious Lois, whom I had met, in passing the night before. This Lois, not her real name, as you can tell not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. [Markin: Nice point, Phil, although I already ‘stole’ that point from you in my review.] Her real name was Sandra Sharp, a college girl from Vassar who, taking some time off from school, was “on the bus” trying to find herself. She was like some delicate flower, a dahlia maybe, like I had never encountered before. I won’t bore you with the forever have to tell what she looked like stuff because that is not what made her, well, intriguing, maddeningly intriguing, like some femme fatale in a crime noir film that Markin, from what I can gather, is always running on about. She was pretty, no question, maybe even a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty if it came to a fair description in the light of day but what made her fetching, enchanting, if that is a different way to say it, was the changes in her facial expressions as she danced, and danced provocatively, dance half-nakedly, around my desire. And I danced, shedding my shirt although I do not remember doing so, danced half-naked around her desire. Then, faintly like a buzz from some hovering insect, maybe a bee, and then more loudly I kept hearing the on-lookers, half-mad with dope and with desire themselves, yelling far out, far out. And Far-Out Phil was born.

Oh, as for Luscious Lois and her desire, well, you figure it out. I might not have been as wise to the ways of the Vassar world in those days when such places were bastions to place the young women of the elite and keep them away from clawing upstarts from the corner boy night as I should have been but the rest of my time on the bus was spend hovering around Lois, and keeping other guys away. I even worked some plebeian “magic” on her one night when I started using certain swear words in her ear that worked for me every Sunday after 8:00 AM Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church with foxy Millie Callahan, back in the day. Far-Out Phil got a little something extra that night, proper Vassar girl or not.

No offense against Iowa, well only a little offense for not being near an ocean, I think. No offense against the university there, well only a little offense for not being Berkeley but after about a week of that campsite and its environs I was ready to move on and it did not matter if it was with Flip-Flop and his crowd or with Captain Crunch (the guy who “led” his clot of merry pranksters, real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia Class of 1958, who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of taking the ride). Captain Crunch, as befitted his dignity (and since it was “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, from what I heard), was merely the “leader” here. The driving was left to another, older guy. This driver was not your mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west) but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one noticed those bumps (or else was so stoned, drug or music-stoned, that those things passed like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Haverford College Class of ’64, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And Cruising was, being just a little older, and about one hundred years more experienced, also weary, very weary of co-eds, copping dope and, frankly, staying in one place for so long. He also wanted to see his girlfriend, or his wife, I am not sure which in Denver so I knew where we were heading. So off we go, let’s get going.

And the passengers. Nobody from the Flip-Flop Express (although Flip-Flop, as usual, lived up to his name and hemmed and hawed about it), they were heading back east, back into the dark Mechanicsville night. I tried, tried like hell, to get Sweet Pea to come along just in case the thing with Lois fell apart or she took some other whim into her head. See, re-invented or not, I still had some all-the-angles boyhood rust hanging on me. We did know for sure that Casey was driving, and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake had not hit yet, or maybe he really was superman. Other whose names I remember: Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), Captain Crunch’s girl friend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice, not his, and he was not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he told it), Dallas Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also had real names that indicated that they were from somewhere that had nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they were also, or almost all were, twenty-somethings that had some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not). And they were all either searching or, like the Captain, were at a stage where they are just hooked into taking the ride.

As for the rest. Well, no one could be exactly sure, as the bus approached the outskirts of Denver, as this was strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Wyoming, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town poky. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music is not for everyone. And while we had plenty of adventures, thinking back on it now, they all came down to drugs, sex, and rock and roll with a little food on the side. If you want to hear about them just ask Markin to contact me. The real thing though, the thing that everybody should remember is that dance night in Ames, Iowa when Phil Larkin got “religion,” 1960s secular religion. He slid back some later, like everybody does, but when he was on the bus he was in very heaven.

Markin note: No question that this story, except perhaps for hormonal adolescents, is better than those dreary old geezer searching for young love tales that he ran by us before. By the way Phil, you don’t happen to have Luscious Lois’, ah, Sandra Sharp’s, cell phone number or e-mail address. And don’t lie and say you don’t have it. You never crossed off a woman’s name from your book in your life. Give it up.