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

the Sea flashing back, like old yellowed pages in a forgotten book.



I  was deep in daydreaming,  waiting for Joey to arrive,  and getting restless as the Johnson outboard motor droned closer and closer to the dock. I, we, all of us didn’t know how he had changed, if at all. Myrika, Mary and Olivia and a few of our volunteers formed a greeting party. Probably with the same apprehension the Indians felt when Pilgrims landed wearing funny hats and carrying bibles.  

“Mickey! Ahoy!! He yelled.

“Ha, welcome aboard,” I returned.

Hugs all around, manly ones, you know,  “we hunt and fish and fuck in bars”  type hugs for we  men, and “gee, I’ve not had a woman or been able to get it up for months” hug for Myrika and Mary. Olivia stood aloof apart with China in her arms. You could tell her veil of tranquility was ripping to shreds.

“She can’t stand him, Mickey.” Myrika informed me as if I didn’t know.

“Play it cool, Darlin’. We’ll pop him over the border as though he is an American  suppository going into Canada’s ass and be done with him.”

Her eyes widened, “I don’t trust.  He could blow  whole thing for a fix. Besides, who’s  other guy with him. We don’t know him.”

Obviously, I felt because of her being from Germany, she suspected everyone of being a Gestapo agent hell bent on rounding us all up for a ride on the Zyklon B express to a gas chamber in Poland.  

His travel companion, Paul, was introduced as a draft resister from Toledo who hooked up with  the Resistance which  gave him a clearance pass which  he produced, all in order.
“Damn good to see you, Joey. Paul, welcome...we’ll get you guys settled and go over the game plan. First..Food!! Let’s get some chow in you two.”

Danny Two Horse took them to a cabin and we gave them time to freshen up and meet later in the mess hall.

Something else had happened recently that sent a helter skelter clockwork orange chill through the core of the counterculture. The mantra of peace and love had been violated and rape by the madman mantra of Charles Manson. Manson’s cult kill five people in movie director Roman Polanski’s Beverly Hills, California, home, including Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. Less than two days later, the group killed again, murdering supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their home.
Helter Skelter had replaced All You Need is Love...and the sun was setting on Flower Power, as the Dark Side of the Sixties Moon was emerging from the horizon.

Manson had gathered a dark cloud of looser humanity around him in the Haight on Cole Street, where he kept them pretty loaded on LSD, held orgies with abandon, making a mockery of the concept of "free love" and indoctrinating them with the Mantra of Manson. What do you expect from a person who had at this point spent half his life incarcerated in some of the finer prison cells America had to offer. How he managed to check out without a psyche evaluation is beyond me, and not committed to a dog pound to be put down as a rabid freak.

He believed in his concept of Helter Skelter which he felt was the impending race war which would prime the pump and get the revolution kicked into high gear.
Manson had listened to the Beatle's "White Album" and proclaimed that he would be bigger than the Beatles. To get ready to join in the BBQ of racial hatred and battle, the family moved into a small yellow house near LA that Manson named, "The Yellow Submarine" and the impending conflagration was dubbed..."Helter Skelter" and he was ready now to enter the recording studio to record his own coded album that would trigger the events.

That was California. With any luck they catch these people, (we didn’t know at the time who they were of course) and kill them on sight….so much for peace and love from me. I only had to deal with speed freaks and junkies before and the stray homosexual making passes at me. (As I told Myrika, what the hell...it’s good to have sex appeal no matter who gets off on it!)

Danny Two Horse pulled me aside. “I’ll get a couple of my guys over here for a few days to help me keep an eye on them.”

“Christ, Danny, it’s not General Custer you know.”

“We’ll make sure of that Kemo Sabe” he said with laugh.

“Just tell Tonto their from Toronto, pronto!”

Turns out my Indian brother had more visionary insight into matters than I gave him credit for and save my paleface ass from going down in flames...Woodstock was coming up and damned if I wanted to miss out on rain, mud and bad acid! Chapter 37 Acid, Mud and Rock and Roll

 

 

The camper, now renamed Flashback, in honor of Senor Owsley,  was as loaded up as we were about to be now that we had taken a speed ball and weed snack attack to launch our chemically powered pharmaceutical selves to the Woodstock Music & Art Festival in Upstate New York. Myrika, myself, and Danny Two Horse along with his girlfriend, Kaylee Abinaw, a Chippewa beauty,   V-Dubbing and smoking doobies kicking asphalt while Joey, Olivia, Baby China and the stranger in a strange land, Paul, Joey’s new found shadow who was creeping us all out would remain behind at the lodge.

We left Victor Abinaw, Kaylee’s rather large no bullshit Indian brother in charge of the compound. He was a Chippewa Indian friend of Danny’s, and was also member of AIM, the American Indian Movement.  He and two other hulking AIM members would keep an eye on Paul and Joey. I left instructions, as if needed, to shoot first...ask questions later if either or both proved to be obstructions, i.e. informants. Danny was more succinct. “Remember, Little Big Horn….No Prisoners!” Damn I like Danny’s style. Kind of Gandhi goes rogue!

We were heading south across the Macinac Bridge beelining it for Ohio... hang a left at Toledo and then fullsteam ahead for Joe Cocker, Ten Years After and Santana among others. We had provisions of smoked white fish, Pinconning cheese, meat jerky, tea and rice and wine.

“Excuse me waiter, but which wine and marijuana go with rice and beans?”

“Very good, Sir. Might I suggest our finest bottle of Chateau Rothschild Ripple, or perhaps a perky Annie Greensprings. For marijuana our chef recommends a righteous Panama Red topped off with a dessert bowl of Heavenly Hash and a speed ball aperitif?”

Perfect waiter. Bring it on. We were ready for The Woodstock Music and Art Fair. We were ready for three days of magical mud, death defying drug intake and Sixties sex. It was billed as an "Aquarian Exposition of Three Days of Peace and Music" to be held on a 600 acre farm in upstate New York. In all, 32 acts performed and by the end of the festival, more than 500,000 attendees had tie dyed their way by bus, foot and thumb to be at the "vortex" of the counterculture for this Kodak moment in time, freeze framed forever in the history of rock and roll music.

Acid flowed as freely as venereal disease in a Bombay whorehouse... free love and sex left a vaginal imprint, as wet and thick as the torrential rains that added to the wilderness wildness of things. It was a moment in time captured by the counterculture, and is legendary as a peaceful assemblage of near half a million young souls and spirits in unity. So many people descended on this strip of sacred agricultural ground that Arlo Guthrie yelled, "The New York Thruway is closed, man!" and Country Joe McDonald did his own calculation of the crowd by announcing.."There's about 300,000 of you fuckers out there!"



This was the culmination point of no return for the Sixties. 1969...we had more than a garden full of guru's that turned out to be more of a compost pile of wannabe weeds. It all started with...Yogi! No, not Yogi The Bear or baseball’s Yogi the Berra. Yogi, not Yoda to you Seventies and Eighties kids.  

This was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the bearded mystical entity that had the Beatles and the Beach Boys sitting at his  feet and in the process.. Made holy sacred cow India Hip! Ravi Shankar music and George Harrison's sitar explorations mixed audibly as a musical perfume fornicating with the scent of patchouli. A typical Sixties aroma that made up for the tell tale you’re busted odor of marijuana coming from apartments in the Haight.

Meanwhile, the banana peel smoking Sunshine Superman, Donovan donned long flowing flowered robes and boarded the TM Orient Express for a visitation with the Hipster of Transcendental Meditation, the Mahareshi. Soon the floodgates were open, Marianne Faithful, the Stones, Mama's and Papa's, Eric Burdon...the entire Sixties Rock and Roll Bus Tour rolled into the the Mahareshi's bus depot. All tossed away their blue jeans and field jacket stage wear in exchange for long robes and gowns that were left overs from some drag queen show in North Beach.

If the Mahareshi could have held sway a bit longer, Fredericks of Hollywood would I am sure come out with a full catalogue of Yogi Wear. The boots were gone replaced by what Merle Haggard referred to as "unmanly footwear" the sandal.

Then there are the Moonies. Founded as a "religion" by the Korean version of P.T. Barnum, Sun Myung Moon who I believe was born in the small village of Suc Muc Dik, or Long Wang, managed to mangle the minds of countless loose screws. And who could forget the Krisna's who bring to mind to me not a higher state of being, but a scene from the film "Airplane" where Robert Stack decks a gowned goon in the terminal. Peace brother!

I don't think I could pull off the gown look, but damn, those Krishna's loved the peach chiffon look while aggressively panhandling from passerby at airports and other terminals. I've even seen them at Greyhound stations. C'mon if you're riding the 'Hound for $50 bucks cross country you're either broke or just released from one the many mental institutions in this country leaving your meds behind in the alley. Now the voices are real, eh? Tambourines and finger bells...all trying to be Mr. Tambourine Man in time and tune with the times.

While we were reeling and rocking as Wavy Gravy grooved on stage talking about hamburgers and bad acid, Dr. Henry Kissinger was playing political peace talk poker with the North Vietnamese in Paris, while the NVA and Viet Cong launched a new offensive of over 150 targets in South Vietnam while Dr. Henry ate pastries at parties. The U.S. death toll was on the rise as Ho Chi Minh declared “fight on until the last Yankee is gone!”  

That was our philosophy as well in a way regarding our ammo of choice...drugs….stay stoned until the last pill is gone…