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

Great Lakes were hung with great care on the gallery wall to be savored by critics and the proletariat alike, soon vaporized and in a puff of smoke were replaced by the very Vishnu visions of his current reality.

War? Peace? To serve or not to serve? To embark on a new journey or face a prison stretch.  Both feelings were converging in me as two rivers colliding at the same time. Nothing was making sense, and everything was out of place on the shelf. Books were upside down and the spines faded, torn and tattered. All the titles were jumbled letters and completely illegible, however, the pages were still intact and readable, but still not making any sense whatsoever. Chapter 17 - The Death of Hip

 

 

The Death of Hip

Joey arrived stateside aboard Fuck the Army Airlines for what the brass thought was a temporary leave before yet another bloodbath My Lai tour of Vietnam. He wasn’t sure who the real enemy was in this political football bowl game, but he was pretty sure, he was on the wrong team.

I picked him up at the bus station in San Fran and would begin our foray into times that were changing faster than a pit crew at NASCAR. I was already wanted by the Feds for draft evasion and Joey would soon join the ranks of military deserters. I still hadn’t told him yet about Olivia’s pregnancy and my willing participation in it...in her. Hoping he wouldn’t have a battle fatigue flashback and kill me on the spot...Peace and Love Brother, remember? This is after all the age of Aquarius!

During the Summer  of '67 the sexual revolution was full tilt boogie. The Haight became a cabaret and costume ball in a crowded back alley bazaar in Tunisia with baskets and dead chickens hanging on hooks. Eric Burdon sang of San Francisco nights, while Scott McKenzie penned the anthem of the Aquarians, with the youth of America flamboyantly festooned with a colorful cornucopia of flowers taking root in their psyche, not to mention, their hair.

It was the Sixties....after all...revolution for the hell of it...art for the hell of it...fondly, Jane found a home in Hanoi, street people were digging the diggers and human beings at a be-in believe in the drug deity of all things hallucinatory.

The four of us would spend our time walking the Haight. We knew every concrete square by name. The Haight had a cacophony to accompany the personal epiphanies experienced by the un-experienced when they became experienced. I personally  enjoyed the Bedouin tent confusion of the streets with it's harem girl and harem boy bacchanal and carnival atmosphere.

Sometimes, I found myself staring down at myself from a rooftop, or just peering back into my own eye sockets.  The acid was a mirror reflection, and mixed with mescaline and smoke, you could be Peter Pan doing Wendy after she finished with seven dwarves.

The purple hazed and double dazed days were days of wine and roses, underwater gardens of strange fishes tended to by Joe, from the country, and all the heat was canned, but survival, like creativity is the mother of invention, so fug it, said Col. Ed Saunders. Mr. Hoffman's first bicycle ride on acid, made Sandoz pharmaceuticals suitable for the subterraneans, while Owsley Stanley became the Henry Ford of colorful dreams on the streets. Orange Wedge, Purple Double Dome, Strawberry, it was all about colors and perception, just ask Jim the Morrison, and the literary hustler Huxley.




The Summer of Love... the streets became clogged and crowded with weekend "hippies". The Diggers were dishing out free food in the park, music was in the air, performed mainly on the stage of the flatbed truck, the dope, she was plentiful and the sky was a zillion rainbows with prismatic balloons floating overhead and inner mind.

To most, this was the beginning of something wonderful, spectacular and spiritual. It was peace and love, while Vietnam raged on unabated, peace and love not withstanding. Timothy Leary preached to the muddled huddled masses to turn on, tune in and drop out, while wearing flowers and kaftans, but over on Cole street on the other side of the garden, was a deadly apparition called Charles Manson seeking out a sect of the weak to help him become the Jesus of Mass Murder.

The political skies were darkening and within a year, another Kennedy and a King would be brought down, and flower power would give way to billy clubs on the streets of bloody Chicago.

The Woodstock Festival in 1969 would fade as Altamont muscled its way into the fray with beer bottles, knives, and pool cues and a death at the hands of Hells Angels, and the peaceful marches of an earlier time would end with the events of deaths on the campus of Kent State. A president would not run for re-election and one was impeached...no wonder we never voted in any election.. Do the math....It's one, two, three, what are we fighting for....equals = four dead in Ohio!

With that in mind, it's no wonder the Haight fell apart at the seams it seems. Acid clashed with heroin, the young spare changers were weekenders of the street, by the street or for the street people of the Haight Ashbury of the Altered States of America. Sexual promiscuity, redlining drug use of acid, grass, mescaline, hashish, Bennies and Dexies, opium, cocaine and a touch of heroin mein herr on occasion.

 

The Haight became a packed Turkish prison cell. No room to move, Greyline sightseeing eye-dog buses barked and chased cars through the social excrement of the enclave, cameras snapping photo's. semi-automatic as fast as a National Guardsman could shoot students down on the commons at Kent State, while tossing tear gas canisters.
The hard core pushers elbowed their way into the fabricn while mental illness and poisoned dope bad trips carved a scene of R.P. McMurphy meeting Alex and his Droogies at Lobotomyland.

The Haight had lost it's shine, it's armor of surrealness, transforming into something, everything, sinister, and by summer’s demise, Hip Was Dead....the Haight was past tensed, The streets took on a meaner demeanor, and da meaner it got, the less we enjoyed it anymore.

Once you cross the threshold, and step through the looking glass...your ass is grass, Amigo.

Chapter 18 - Bombed in Berkeley

Bombed in Berkeley

The Haight was getting ready to implode in June of ‘67 as the war in Vietnam was setting American cities on fire. Joey was now AWOL for over four months, or in military parlance, he was a deserter. We had delayed contacting “The Resistance”  long enough.  Best boogie now or we’d both be sharing a prison cell with what Arlo Guthrie termed, Mother rapers...Father rapers...all kinds of mean nasty people from the Group W bench.

I had made contact with “The Resistance” as it was called through one of my SDS contacts Berkeley. We were driving across the Bay Bridge to meet with them on how to get he and Olivia to Canada safely.

As we cruised along the bridge,  I managed to bring up a subject we had avoided for months. “I’m glad you weren’t too upset with me Joey, about Olivia and all. We didn’t plan it, honest. It just happened.”

“It’s OK, done, forgotten. Besides in Saigon I was not exactly a saint. I was made at first when you two told me, and it took four joints and Myrika to calm me down. In a way, I’m glad it was you, and not some stranger I never knew who only wanted a piece of ass.  I figured with you two, it was much deeper. She is a great girl, a little young  for either of us, but, well, glad it was you. We don’t mention it again OK?”

“It’s a deal.” I said. “I thought for sure when we told you, you were gonna kill me!”

“Don’t think I didn’t think of it!”

We never mentioned it again.

After our initial foray into the “underground” our SDS contact put us in touch with a David Harris who formed the organization in his Palo Alto commune run by he and his folk singing wife, Joan Baez.

We attended a Resistance rally in the spring of  67 at Kezar stadium in San Francisco David  told the us and a monster crowd,  “This war will not be made in our names; this war will not be made with our hands; we will not carry rifles to butcher the Vietnamese people and the prisons of the United States will be full of young people who will not honor the orders of murder."

Another Resistance organizer Lennie Heller spoke at the same rally telling us, the assemble  “The only way out is the hard way. That means incurring personal risks. That means attacking the machine with your minds, your bodies, and inevitably with your lives. The Resistance will carry on its struggle in jail and out. Our bodies might be locked up, but we would continue to organize.”

Earlier in ‘67 the SDS had adopted a militant draft resistance program. Local representatives at the National Council meeting voted to take on the state. At that point SDS had moved to a radicalism that defied the power of the state in a way associated  with the anarchist movement.” It was a powerful organization as they were on university campuses with 400 plus  chapters across the country, from a little seed planted in the People’s Republic of Ann Arbor followed by the Port Huron Statement.

It had been almost a decade since the first American Marine died in Vietnam. America was divided with almost  60% supporting  the war. General Hershey, no relation to the Hershey Kisses family was  the head of the Selective Service System. In an interesting  memo Hershey stated the need to develop more effective human beings in the national interest. Sieg Heil Mein Furher! Look in the sky, it’s the Luftwaffe...It’s a B-52...It’s the German Superman.   Mario Savio said “I’m not Jewish but, nothing affected my consciousness more than those pictures,” of “heaps of bodies, mounds of bodies,” in the concentration camps at the end of WWII.

We rolled in Berkeley and went to the Resistance office on Telegraph Ave., parked the camper and went in. We were greeted by a Mr. Will Rogers. I kid you not. Will Fucking Rogers. We were now entering the “underground” and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and we wanted to be his neighbor.

“Mickey, Joey, welcome. David called and set this