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

school and had also made her way to New York to pursue a career wearing ballet slippers and imitating swans on stage. We were close friends and wanted to let her know we would be leaving soon and why. If there was going to be an eve of destruction I wanted to far far away in some invisible wonderland.

 

Chapter 3 - The Counter Culture Looking Glass Express

 

 

The Counterculture Looking Glass Express
The dark, cold, grey days of a New York City winter were moving over ever so slowly to make way for the inevitable spring rebirth of warm pleasant rain and sunshine of April 1967. The streets of the Village where Myrika and I shared an apartment once again exploded to life with an electric current of eclectic humanity. A Bohemian bolshevism permeated the streets.

From our window we could watch the daily artistic melange of street performers, radical speakers from the Free Speech Movement all blended in a bizarre three dimensional Diego Rivera portrait along with the sinners and saints, hookers, male hustlers and junkies from Thompson Square Park hyped up and hopped up on the hopes and dreams of the next fix of junk or sex.
Today we were in high spirits. Myrika and I had our plans outlined to leave NYC before the draft board could unleash it’s bloodhounds to track me through the chain gang swamps and award me with three hots and a cot in some Federal prison with an oversexed lifer doing time for cannibalizing his family at Easter. She and Olivia, Joeys now 17 year old girlfriend had moved from Detroit to New York and was now crashing with us with dreams of being an actress on Broadway. I promised Joey we’d look after her, and we did. I guess I was overzealous in my caretaking. I managed to get her pregnant. Myrika was understanding about it however. She had her own flings. Joey would not be so understanding when he returned. He was a hot headed dago who had already killed in action.

Tonight some friends would come over to celebrate our stand against the war by defying it. Hell, why not, it was my ass, not theirs. We would get stoned and drunk tonight and in two days hit the highway for California. We had the VW bus cleaned up inside and out and it was more than a camper...it was bong on wheels and we were about to embark through the looking glass of the Sixties.

We lived in the eye of the sociological hurricane. The Village was a Bohemian art colony smack dab in the the middle of the Hobbit infested middle earth of . shops & artisans posing as a fine wine aging in an oak cask. Eventually It became gentrified capitalism and commercialism trying to sell new Caddilacs in a used car lot. Yes, the artists came, yes the tourists came, and yes, the "hippies" came and did what they will do and did in those days...you know, "Spare Change?" You have to remember, it was not a real Utopia. In flesh and lust, it was not a real "woman" but a drag queen on a runway strutting her stuff, attractive maybe, but not the real deal.

Keep in mind, the Spare Change Sixties came on like a dayglo banshee, screaming and screeching. The counterculture was on the move to the beat of a communication breakdown The Military Industrial nation stood naked in a pool of hypocrisy and the new generation, were beginning to move like so many ants across the asphalt expanse of America. The East Village to Haight Ashbury, east coast to the west, the neighborhoods were psychedelic bi-coastal sexual bookends anchored in fog and smoke enshrouded harbors. The ragtag army traveled by thumb, by car and V-dub vans.

The Sexual Revolution was on. It was a time of Yellow Submarines and magic carpet rides. The difference itself was as divided as night and day-glo. The acid poured like rain from a monsoon in New Mexico painting a colorful portrait on a blank canvas in double domes of purple to alter the states of the alter ego's.

 

The Age of Aquarius held forth the promise of Peace and Love. A street hooker hiking her skirt to show you a pay as you go paradise in a cheap hotel room with yellowed shades from too much smoke and bed sheets that have seen more than their share of sexual activity by nameless faceless johns and whores. All yours for a few bucks and the expenditure of fluids.
The counterculture promised a new Utopia offered up to us as a virgin is stripped and sacrificed to appease some ghoulish tribal god or King Kong.. The decade turned on, tuned in and dropped out at a furious pedal to the metal high speed race going from Zero to Sixties on the drag strip of free love, drugs and revolution. In time, the peaceful revolution went from Jekyll to Hyde with the pipe bomb politics of the Weathermen.

The Summer of Love would eventually end with the Death of Hip and the runaways would all go back home to the Midwest from whence they came beat and spent, wondering, where the fuck was this Utopia? Where was the revolution? Who gave me crabs?The Gilded Age of the Hip was tarnished by the gunning down later of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The Hippies were replaced by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and other Yippies of the Youth International Party. Meanwhile, the dogma laden Students for a Democratic Society didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, they saw it coming and it was Mark Rudd and his vandals that stole the pump handle and packed if full of explosives.

The hipsters of the '50's and the Hippies of the '60s shared common heroes from Kerouac to Ghandi, and shared their heroes personal quests of civil disobedience and public drunkeness. It was a tightrope walk of cultures that met and morphed into a wonderful bastard child of pop counter culture.

For myself, Myrika and Olivia it was time to load up the sociological bus, inhale deeply and take a magical journey aboard the Looking Glass Express.

Chapter 4 Cheap Wine Nights

While Myrika and Olivia went to Ben Wong’s store around the corner from our apartment to pick up a few gallons of cheap wine, beer and  a few blocks of mozzarella cheese for the gathering of the degenerate tribe that evening, I hoofed it over to Washington Square Park to score a bag or two of weed and some acid that had been making a grand appearance in greater numbers lately.

The lava flow of the Vesuvian Sixties didn't race down a Mediterranean mountainside. Instead, it flowed through the inner mind with heat and hot sexy colors performing their ballet of bubbles.The weed seeds of the counterculture of the spare change Sixties were planted a long time ago in a compost pile of history that goes back thousands of years. The early American Colonists were no stranger to cannabis and we can trace the nation’s hemp lineage from Washington and Jefferson to Cheech and Chong!

LSD was sanctified to a higher level by the high priest of the Garden of Chemical Eden, Timothy Leary, and one man, and many pranksters, took it even further, to a chemical roadshow that ate asphalt from the psychedelic colors of the west coast to the grey east of New York City and it's teeming tenements and lofts of the East Village. Timothy Leary was the high priest of LSD, turning on, tuning in, and dropping out while dropping acid by the bucketful.


Drugs and a human rights, civil rights and sexual revolution were all  storming the Bastille...the bastion of straight America. If the Fifties were sociologically antiseptic with Madison Ave. ring-a-ding ding martini lunches, Leave it to Beaver and consumerism cranked on overload, the Sixties were by comparison a plain brown bag holding a cheap bottle of wine that spilled out onto the streets and on the march. There was no turning back as the point of no return had been crossed in Greenwich Village in hard concrete gray New York to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury.

I wrote Joey in Vietnam that Myrika, Olivia and I were going to head west to California. He wrote back saying he was due to return to Oakland after his tour of duty in Vietnam ended in two months. He’d be home stateside for a 30 day leave before he completed his military duties. He’d meet up with us on the coast.  He didn’t know Olivia was pregnant nor that it was my kid growing inside her like a watermelon fertilized by his best friend.

By the time 8 P.M. rolled around the entire gang of human refuse as we called ourselves were getting our wine soaked weed buzz on and dropping acid and eating cheese that soon began to sing and dance. I swore it was Gene Kelly singin’ in the rain...but then again it may have been the acid.

Keeley, an androgynous female poet with short jet black close cropped hair (and sometimes Myrika’s bed partner) was the first to offer up a toast. “To the future...your future in California as you leave your past behind in New York!” Which was all Peter Kopek, our resident fag poet as he referred to himself proudly, “There you go you cantankerous whore. Stealing from Kerouac again!  I wouldn’t let you give me a blow job if I was bursting at the seams with a full tank of semen while you recite Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” while you play with your own tits.”

The strange thing was...I think Keeley and Peter made a great match. Both perfectly bitchy and caustic, not just to each other, but aimed their barbs at anyone they chose depending on their moods, but seemed to take great delight in parry and thrust antics designed to draw verbal blood from each other. She somewhat manly in bearing and he a mincing marvel of  boy-man.

The rest of the group included Corinne, our resident evil folksinger who was determined at all parties to pick up her guitar and regale us with downer songs of death and disaster.  If we were in a benzedrine mood, she was a musical barbiturate. If we were in a 78 RPM frame of mind, her needle would be stuck at 33 ⅓.

Collin Murphy was a hulking mick from Dublin who we suspected