The Army Diaries by Mike Marino (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

The Army Diaries - Prelude to a Prey Lewd

Kent State - "Red rover, red rover, let the National Guard come over...."

Mike had spent the past few years on the road, on the streets, bummed and beat, not to mention rowing his boat far from the shore of childhood, on an ocean littered with row upon row of skids.

In Hawaiian Hallelulia Honolulu, Mike was marooned, beached and burnt by the sun, later left naked, Sunset Stripped on the go-go road of Lost Loss (Los?) Angeles...no angels, just lots of loss...hot stilleto heel trampling, (hey, some people pay good money for that~!) while scientifically sampling a cadre of the population well versed it seems in fornication, hipsters and hookers, posing as poets while at the same time injesting suggested digestible and copious amounts of chemistry designed for better living in the social science anthropological Haight-Ashbury, The Haight! Too hip for it's own good, North Beach in San FranFriskyCo with it's teasing trannies in training bra's with full magnums of boobs to tease and tempt the teenage tramps.

The year was now 1968....Kent State was still a couple of years away but the protest path had been broken and was heading straight to the political crossroads of the campus, Mike was now entering the political forest and would soon become a pathfinder. But...just where would this path lead?

Mike's old friend, and manic mentor, a terrific beatific hornblowing Honolulu cabbie who took the young runaway under wing and tutelage, Doc Yucatan, had burst forth into Mikes life with the force and impact of a white-hot light-blinding hydrogen detonation..

Eventually, Doc became a mellow fellow and morphed into the shape of a desultry dream catcher, migrating from the palm frond frontier of an island paradiso, he found comfort in settling into the azure, silver and turquoise chanting mandala of the crazy Navajo of Nuevo Mexico.

Doc visited an old Korean war buddy there, a Navajo-Mex mix art gallery owner, named Gallegos, no first name, just Gallegos, and he led Doc on a personsal journey, deep into the mirage of the desert where you don't find the peyote, but where the peyote can find you, as it did him. From then on, his spiritual headress was of the Peyote Coyote, Doc, with Mike along side, breast feeding his zen tao persona of the haiku hobo, scouring the desert together looking to mentally if not physically, if it were possible, to screw one or two of the deserts psychedelically delightful cacti muses...the islands to the mainlands...Hawaii. Mike never thought Doc would ever leave that tropical fruit basket he had called home....but then....

In early 1967, Doc's wife died, and his legitimate and numerous bastard spawn were scattered like seeds on the wind. eastward and westward, northward and southward. Doc was alone now in his mind, so he sold the cab, the house, and said "Aloha" to Hawaii and Hola to Taos, New Mexico, dibbling and dabbling in far-out far-Eastern philosophy and further out in anarchic arts. Mike and Doc couldn't wait to see each other after so long a lapse, so a trip was planned. (They would soon have cravings for cantina's and sexual senorita's S.O.B. or South of the Border, Bard and Pard, down Mejico way...Mike wrote about those adventures in his book, "The Peyote Coyote", so no need to go into them again for an orgasmic peek under brown skinned skirts in this diary diatribe by the same prose scriber.

Mike hadn't seen the wiley wizard of oddity cab driving pirate for a couple of years, Doc was now flying into San Francisco from quirky Albuquerque, so Mike, along with John, his Berkeley buddy, coaxed the wheezing, mechanically arthritic V-Dub camper to the airport south of the city and picked up Doc for the reunion of two haiku hobo's plus one, a not so cerebral cerebellum celebraton. St. John of the VW, the part time messianic Mechanic, the Tao Te Chi of the Times....and no, Taos is not the plural of Tao, that would be Tao's....Haiku times two equals Tao squared...or Wen = Wu...Wen and Wen equals Wu....confusing confucian math especially when Tao does not equal two....Tao and Tao = Four, however, as does two plus two....They all had dinner in North Beach, downed many a cheap brown bagged ragged bottle of any port in the storm port. the fog had rolled in earlier and the drunken fog was talking in a slur, loud in the bar on the beach where drunk fogs hang out with other drunken weather elements, so John (the human) bid adieu and disappeared through the fog (not human), over the Bay Bridge to his side of the looking glass, Berkeley...Mike and Doc headed to Mike's apartment in the Haight and smoked and talked of old times all night long....both of them drunker than the friggin' fog and the night would find them even foggier by morning, not to mention drunker.

The next morning they walked along the Embarcadero."Know this, boy. Ya'll been doing too much in the field of drug research, self-inflicted experimentation and all. Downers, uppers, opium, grass and hash. You're a walkin' pharmacuetical dictionary from A-Z. You're becoming a goddamn Nazi concentration camp experiment destined to die in a cold water bath. So many fuckin' drugs we'll have to start calling you "Sandoz!" ranted Doc with the exuberance, though not the eloquence, of a young fair haired prince named Arthur yanking Excalibur from it's stone encasement...Mike looked incredulously at him. "Wait, wait just a damn minute here Doc. If memory serves me, the memory fueled with a few high octane is that it? Right?" Doc, inhaled deep, and handed the joint back to Mike. "Damn straight boy, damn straight, save ye braincells, the ones that is left, and all the fumes in the gas tank.

"Damnit Doc" Mike said, "You gave my that first joint in your old raggedy ass cab and taught me that only amateur hustlers use a rollin' machine. We scored together, got high together, sold weed together, and now you're saying Dorian Grey had better get a grip," as he exhaled long and satisfied. Only Doc could talk about the dangers of drug abuse while smoking a joint and actually pull it off so it seemed nat'chul, as smooth as a transvestite doing his/her best Dusty Springfield on the stage at Finocchio's..."I Only Want to be with You" dancing and prancing.


"That was then boy. The past. You was younger, and I was too, though old to you no matter what age we both get, ones always ahead of 'tother until one of us crosses the finish line to vainglorious victory in Valhalla, amen, brother, ah-men. See, the days, the days is different now. You've been mixing dope up in different disguises, in concoctions I can't even figger anymore, and besides, you're almost out of that childhood you keep bitchin' about missin', well you ain't missed it, it was always there, but damn boy, grow up. There's a war on an all, kids gettin' kilt, people getting tear gassed and kicked assed, and all you think about is gettin' high, well it's high time you put down the pipe and the rolling papers and get straight. You know, the times they are a changin' as they say," and Mike knew Doc was right.

He was 20 now, almost and had to clean up for the debutante ball of maturity. From dope fiend to dope free but how. Politics, yeah, the war sucked and he had been involved in some early demonstrations about rights, civil and sexual, and now the war was heating up. The country starting to splinter. "Yeah," said Doc. "That Vietnam, were that a woman would be one prime hot piece of ass the way we fuss over it," and her commie red negligee, sheer and sexy for the times. If war was sex, then Vietnam was the generational generator powered Vaginal Machine sucking our country's politicians and generals into her moist opening deeper and deeper, content with being red, white and screwed.

The Viet Minh. What a vixen she were. She was explosively sexy in a Pentagon sort of way and was a mighty morsel that fed the wheelchair bound wounded living on giant gulps of morphine and it's subsequent dreams. She was a tempting tasty treat of a whore, hard to resist for that crazy uncle from out of town, the one that no one talks about in the family and is the one shunned at familial gatherings. "Youbetcha! Why, it's jes' my crazy old Uncle Sam.

Hell, he had spent decades pimping out Lady Liberty as a soiled dove, and political prostitute of The Demon, Cracy in war after war after war from the brothels of Montezuma to the whores of Tripoli," A tip of a Panama Red hat and a bust your balls canal greeting as Teddy of the Big Stick Tribe yelled "Bully, bully" all the way home. Sans a redcoat revulsion and revolution, sans the twin's WWI and II, America has for the most part been seen, analyzed and concluded by "foreign" eyes, as the Ugly American.

The Sixties, tie-dyed nirvana, with a twinged sunrise of purple-haze to lead the daily parade of altered-states and altered-egos of the double dazed, and not one, let alone 76 trombones to lead the procession down Mainstreet U.S. of A., eh?

Old enough to kill, but not old enough to drink or vote, now that is teetotaling totalitarianism of the highest parental and political degree. Alice had her restaurante, Phil Ochs ached, Mr. Dylan wanted to know the answer my friend, and Country Joe did the bodybag rag while Jane, the Fonda fond of Hanoi, annoyed the hardhats and hardheaded men of construction sites and Merle the Pearl Haggard himsef', that damned Okie from Muskogee...where sandals are not considered manly footwear and they don't take their trips on LSD...rotgut moonshine maybe so's you beat yer wife near half ta death, me'be and that little cousin of yorn, all of 13 now, shore starts to look good all filled out and all. Yep, these were the pious Americans...middle Americans..middle finger Americans...the ones you see on the Opry stage and audience. Goddamn love it or goddamn leave it....or just bloody Goddammnittttt!

The era was a ruanway train, fueled by dissent and a rather large needle full of a propensity for protestation. Draft cards and bra's burned side by side, with the bra's the bigger attraction, I'll grant you.

Ok, number 0004 going up in flames does not, I repeat, does not have the imaginative visual appeal of a massive 44-double D going up in heat and flames and shooting full into the sky like a Fourth of Jew-lie rocket! Twin silo's unleashed for peace and equality. Freedom for Freidan...and glorious Steinham and that cute little bunny tail of hers.

Doc was making sense. Yeah, not just grow up and get off the dragstrip of drugs, but fight the war...from within..not on the streets, but within the military body itself, a liberal cancer eating away from within, eroding it, weakening the khaki green machine, toppling the Pentagon, not merely levitating it, then in the end...end the war...bring about the peace...and get ready for the next one...a real fucking "Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" moment....great plan...but apparantly the planets weren't aligned properly or something, and the lesson learned? Never make plans to join the military to bring it to it's knees while stoned....inhale...now, raise your right hand...do you swear allegiance to the United States of America? "Well, no,