Dark Side of the 60's Moon by Mike Marino (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

1950's while crowning themselves with Sinatra hats with a little bands holding a decorative feather, and the band circled the brim, rings of Saturn with moons and debris.

We would unwind at the Psychedelic Shop numerous times before we scored an apartment, But for now, we three were one,   floating free in a mandala, joined at the hip in the land of the hipsters. Haight Street itself was an arterial flow of abject abstraction, not objectionable in the least, at the most, it was a small wisp of smoke from the campfire of time that would soon burn out altogether.

Art, music, literature, street theater, mimes and jugglers. A psychedelic circus under a pharmacological big top with big tabs and bigger pills and monster joints and mescaline, peyote and acid trips, lightly fantastic with fantastico fantasy's turned inside out into realities. It had a "Fantasia-esque" surreal appeal to me given  my  addiction to non-conformity. There was an air of bizarre individuality with a communal lisp to its voice.

As we walked down the street one of the many pharmacological mobile merchants approached us about scoring some acid and speed. The combination was too much to refuse so we forked over the money and scored two tabs of acid and four hits of speed. What the hell, it was almost dinner time, well past dinner time in suburbia in fact, so we dropped the acid and went into the doughnut shop, Tracey’s Doughnuts, we had heard about.

It was wafer thin and the counter was lined with cheap vinyl clad stools on silver pedestals and you could barely walk between the stools and the wall without bumping into someone or something. In the back of shop, along the right side corner was a jukebox, Bob Dylan playing for a quarter, and everyone did agree...everyone must get stoned and were and then some, and as you veered to the physical and political left of the jukebox, (jukeboxes are notorious Bolsheviks) along the wall it went straight again to the bathrooms and a back door to the outside where drug deals were made in the narco shade of night.

The acid we dropped earlier, the strawberry kind, later sunshine bursts and double domes of purple haze would embrace us, but the current tab, looking like a St. Joseph aspirin, but with more kick than a Catholic took hold, so we decided to spend the night there drinking coffee, talking with others, tripping and taking speed until dawn.

We’d left for an hour walking down Haight St. around 10 p.m. The acid propelled us along the glistening streets of the Haight, small puddles rehlecting stars, moon and neon joining hands, many hands, many colors, many explanations. The world was a fish-eye lens projection, the faces took on a topographical look, and your own eyes looked down from above watching you watch them, a trick with mirrors no doubt, mass reflection hallucination.

Eventually we become landed gentry by renting an apartment at the corner of Haight & Ashbury, ground zero of  the counterculture in a second floor walk up apartment above a store.

We did the crash pad scene before that when the Camper got cramped. Those  were another story altogether. When new arrivals stepped off the rucksack boat they mustered and piled though the imaginary Ellis Island in Haight Ashbury, One of the prominent ones was at 1090 Page Street and it wasn't unusual to find people crashed out in the foyer, lining the steps.

In the basement, was the  daunting Dante's Inferno of junkies mainlining in the Shooting Gallery as it was called,  and there was always a pot of stew or some type of food brewing laced with acid and speed, free for the taking. Stained mattresses from previous explorers lined the floor along the walls and couples merely rock n' rolled and balled until the cows came home and left their own juice as sexual graffiti to mingle with the sex of the past, giving it continuing life as the mattress fed itself from the human passions that let loose and jettisoned love and lust.

Within a month, Myrika and I  were selling drugs, which were cheap and plentiful. We  were getting tired of living on the streets and in the camper, so in between furiously writing in my journal, I landed a part-time job to write for one of the underground weeklies in the area. News from the Haight and that sort of thing that paid $10 a week plus would sell the papers to tourists on the weekend, hawking them on the corner.

That and selling drugs began to add up and we  opened a Bank of America savings account, how establishment is that, and soon had enough saved up for a month for our apartment. The little flat was up a flight of stairs  on the left. As you reached the top you made a 180 and there was the door to the $15 a week apartment. It had traditional Victorian Bay windows in the living room which was almost circular in design, and you could sit there stoned and view the street procession at the corner of Love and Peace for hours. To the right of the apartment door as you entered was a small 10 x 10 bedroom. The bathroom was down the skinny hall on the right and the back area was a communal kitchen with hotplates and a beat up old refrigerator. There was a beat bed in the bedroom, but Myrika and I would roll out my  sleeping bag in the living room so as not to miss a beat of the anthropological concert below, and allow the pregnant Olivia to have the bed for which we did buy sheets and blankets for.

It  was a dive, but it was our dive that would be shared off and on with a cadre of characters from the street over the next year. Old beats, new hip, black jazz cats, and young kittens, marijuana, speed, LSD, mescaline, peyote and the damndest mixtures of each you could imagine. I even got an old record player at the free store and started a record collection, mainly of local bands and Beatles.

Change however was in the air, as 1967 loomed on the Haight horizon. The streets were starting to get crowded, the noise louder and the drugs a torrent of Niagra Falls. It would be the year of Charlie Manson, Hells Angels, the Grateful Dead, the Great Society, Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, and every band around in town...the venues...Filmore, Avalon. The state was set for the curtain to rise and fall on the Summer of Love..and the Death of Hip. Chapter 16 - War, Peace & Narcotics

 

 

 

 

 

 

War, Peace, Narcotics

Joey Russo was now homeward bound from the bloody jungles of Vietnam to rejoin his three best friends in San Francisco to toss himself into the wilderness of the anti-war movement after a brief two stopover in Hawaii on military transport. Eventually he made clear to me that he and Olivia would be heading north to Canada. Deserters from the army are high on the Pentagon hit list along with increasing the Viet Cong body count. Sharing a Leavenworth prison cell and hard labor were no comparison to a cabin in the Canadian Rockies among a community of kindred souls...fellow deserters, draft dodgers, CO’s and others who chose to leave it rather than love it. Besides, they may not smoke marijuana in Muskogee, but Vietnam was another story. They had opium too...how lucky is that?

Just before heading off the island of Oahu Joey called me in San Francisco, and after talking first with Olivia laying out his plans, he asked for me to pick up the phone where he described Honolulu to me in vivid Polynesian  technicolor commentary.

The Hawaiian islands made the  midwest look bleak, dusty, dingy by comparison.

“I tell ya Mickey, I swear even nuns here on the beach would strip  and dance bare chested pleasing pagan statues. Hell, even the goddamned priests would cast aside their frocks, rosaries and piety, and shed their pale skin like the snakes of Eden.”

I began having my own visions of island living, fueled of course by a hit of Strawberry acid I had dropped a half hour prior. I pictured Honolulu hula girls stacked like a great cord of hardwood outside a cabin in a Michigan forest. Honolulu's finest babies, goddesses really. Nubile all. Big beautiful saucer sized brown eyes, with matching, inviting "soft to the touch" cop a feel breasts with  nipples standing tall and proud at full colonial attention for my personal inspection. Muses descending from sky thrones of soft clouds placing  a scented boa of intoxicating Kapiolani flora gently over my head.

Honolulu. Bitchin' surfs up dude paradiso! Soon in my mind’s eye  I would kick off my imaginary  sandals while the soles of my feet, still midwest tender, would turn into a fiery bottom spanking red outrage. In time, they would harden and toughen, as tough as a Cherokee Indian Nation tanned leather hide, and I would be able to brave the hot beach sand as easily and as religiously as the most devout firewalkers in all of transcendental India.


My mind looked lovingly at Myrika reading  one  of her books of poetry by her favorite poet, Ranier Maria Rilke , the existential modernist. Joey and I talked for a long time about times galaxies and light years away. An inner black light flashed on and off, and on again, crackling the already frayed mental wires causing memory banks to spark to life, traveling back months, eons ago. A time before optimism, principles and innocent passions.

Joey and I compadres and brothers of flashlight tag and marbles since we were 6 years old. Now we were both on the run from a war we didn’t believe in. Our lives had changed from play war “bang you’re dead” to real war.  The fantasy alleys composed of bricks and children's dreams were no longer safe for invisible, invincible pirates, cheap plastic cowboys and bendable rubber Indians. We now viewed them as dark, dank walled-in avenues of crumbling brick, littered with broken bottles, shattered dreams, death pale skin and collapsed veins from too many nightmare junkie spikes of war machine narcotics.

The longer we talked, the nostalgia inside was building  and turning to dreams of Michigan and what had been home. Those magnificent Michigan days in the fall with the forests and low hills of the Upper Peninsula would be on fire, ablaze with a visual symphony and beatific wildfire of deep reds of maples and the subtle yellows displayed by the shoreline birches. In the Straits of Mackinac where two giant great lakes meet in whitecap, wind tossed copulation, bone chilling winds would now in December be charging in from the Arctic north, a gift from the Yukon, would eminate  from the loins of invisible and impossible gods sitting high on impeccable thrones. The howling winds would cut and slice through the region like the frozen blue flame of an out of control blowtorch through the thin human skin as they increased in intensity and mush-raced down full throttle from Henry's Hudson Bay in the far north, a land inhabited by incredible Inuits and naughty Nanooks.

The plaid sky paintings of the