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

creativity, drug and sexual exploration. Toronto  was Canada’s underground  ground zero. Music? You betcha as they say in Ontario...Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, Buffy St. Marie,  and Neil Young to name a few gravitated to its nucleus.



The summer of ‘69 also brought one hell of a peace rally/concert to town, partly funded by those madcap marauding band of motorcycle misfits, the Vagabond motorcycle club. It was the infamous Live Peace in Toronto Concert with John and Yoko, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voorman among others. The show almost went up in smoke, however when John and Yoko decided at the last minute to stay in bed and fuck for peace. Clapton was pissed off by all accounts and reamed their  collective asses. Look, John, you can fuck Yoko anytime, but don’t fuck over the fans or the peace movement. Peace in Vietnam now...a piece of ass later.


By this time Joey was living on the streets. He would fly high at night with a jet stream fix in his arm, a communist sympathizer now and a junkie...in an ocean of heroin
on streets full of Chinese restaurants, one room bars with one broken stool, deep within the loins of the tenderloin.  



By the day of the Peace Concert Joey  was dog  weary at the end of that day as he made his way to the concert walking it seemed upwards against the downward flow of a thousand liquid rain children freely falling from the skies, as other children had broken free from the split apart pinata and spilled out, falling and bouncing down the street  where  he carefully dodged them artfully as he stumble walked in a drug stupor.

Joey stopped to shoot up in some vacant alley carefully unwrapping his works kit tied gently with ribbon, a child unwrapping a doll in the early morning of a snowy Christmas, he would prepare himself for the injection, a prize fighter, a pugilist warming up in the locker room to step into the ring of addiction and shoot up while humming syringe hymns with Lenny Bruce junkie juice flowing hot and steamy as if he were at a pharmaceutical convention, with unconventional doctors  wearing togas stolen from New York City bath house locker rooms while dancing to the clack clack music of a typewriter with keys that stuck and ribbons that were worn and faded.

It was almost showtime...Peacetime and by now Joey was  propelled by a warm fuel injected injection, veins rising to the surface of the skin, magma breaking through the earth. The cooked cuisine railroading itself through the bloodstream, Michelangelo was careful, not to knock over a marble statue, Joey was careful not to collapse a vein, or shoot in vain.

Most of Joey’s veins were a bruised swampy green and black-blue bruised too, weaker and harder to raise, a limp pulp, even with a gentle spank, have to use the bottom of his feet soon, but they too already bore the scars, but soon...soon...the heroin heroine claims her right, right to the brain. Nodding and smiling, casually laying back in the rickety chair, the junk microwaved in the bloodstream, so warm it's global warming swarming over you in layers melting your personal ice caps, arctic and antarctic.

Soon .the effects of the drug wear off, a tired old flying horse coming in for a crash landing, Baron von Benzedrine and the Goddess Aphrodite Amphetamine rush to the scene to the rescue all mixed up in a baggie cloudy with powder or a dark brown bottle of an old prescription that belonged to someone else in the basement of an old Victorian owned by an old Edwardian, where junkies would line the walls sitting on the floor until too much speed makes your insides ache, until your hunger returns for a curtain call...after you vomit a vile bile and it is standing room only at the shooting gallery and the turntables turn the tables, but the song is scratched on the vinyl, making that shhhing sound as the needle refuses to go forward, or backward, and enjoys being in neutral.

A month later,  post Peace we got the news in a letter from Mr. Levesque….Joey had OD’d and DOA before you could say...Give Peace a Chance. He never did find peace of mind...or in Vietnam that day….


Chapter 50 - broken Treaties and Altered States

The Native American tribes were on the move once again, although this time the ‘Trail of Tears’ crowd would be heading for Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay to “liberate” ‘The Rock’ from those pesky pelicans who roost and crap all over the place  and  the Civil War prisoners, Capone era gangsters and lighthouse keeper ghosts  whose disembodied spirits, the current residents reside, roaming the empty mess hall and cliffs seeking parole or a full pardon from their earthbound spectral prison.

 

Although the Altered States of America were were in the fuel injected dragstrip fourth gear of the societal revolt mode, Vietnam had it’s own fair share of societal and religious upheavals  that began with the buddhist monk barbeques, where in protest some torched themselves in  1963 making a political point and the cover of Look Magazine at the same time. Apparently, Sdidhartha Gautama Buddha wasn’t in a laughing mood anymore. In May of that year, South Vietnamese police shot unarmed civilians in Hue who were protesting the recent ban on displaying the Buddhist flag. No, the Buddhists  were not shot by million dollar rich NFL football players taking a knee contrary to what you may think, so leave the Steelers and Cowboys out of it. They wear football jersey’s not, military uniforms. The is better.

 

In November,  after six months of tension and growing opposition to the Diem regime, generals of the Vietnamese army, with the aid and assistance of the CIA  orchestrated a coup d’etat, which led to the collapse of the Diem government which included the arrest and no appeals assassination of President Ngo Đinh Diem. He was eventually replaced by U.S. supported Nguyen Van Thieu, not an easy dictator to get along with either, but what the hell..he was our guy after all and that’s all that mattered. I remember Dick Gregory referring to “elections” there as being decidedly one sided or what Dick called...the Thieu Party System!

 

On the flipside of the Pacific coin, America has its own history of broken treaties with the Native American tribes that included backstabbing by the Great Emancipator, Abe “Make America Great Again” Lincoln. In 1862, the Santee Sioux of Minnesota grew tired of waiting for the money they had been promised for the sale of  acres of land to the federal government in 1851. Appeals to by now President Lincoln fell on deaf ears. The Indians were hungry and facing starvation with the upcoming winter. They were pissed and decided to revolt.

Lincoln refused to pay the owed money, and assigned General John Pope to put down  the uprising. None of the Indians tried were given any semblance of a defense. Their trials lasted approximately ten  minutes each. Adult males were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death with the only evidence against them being they had been present during a "war" which they themselves had declared against the government.

The authorities in Minnesota asked Lincoln to order the immediate execution of all 303 males found guilty. Lincoln offered a compromise. They would cut the list of those to be hung down to 39. In return, Lincoln promised to kill or remove every Indian from the state and provide Minnesota with two million dollars in federal funds.

 

Where the hell is FEMA when you need them?

 

All that and broken promise by broken promise by subsequent administrations reached the boiling point  and part of the reason for the Alcatraz takeover being the one we were about to get embroiled in. Again, if Feds relinquished the property...the Natives could have it, but went back on the deal.

 

The Native Americans even offered the federal government the same amount for the land that the government had initially offered them when they hijacked it originally  at 47 cents an  acre, this amounted to $9.40 for the entire rocky island. The government was not amused and the protesters left under threat that they would be charged with felony.

In the early morning hours of November 20  89 American Indians, including over 30 women, students, married couples,  singles, and children children, set out to occupy Alcatraz Island.  Remember this was not Cuba setting up Russki rockets to bomb Ft. Lauderdale and ruin Spring Break, but the Coast Guard set up a blockade preventing  most of them from landing. By the time we arrived there were close to
400 protesters, including us. Native and non-native people brought food and other necessary items to the people on the island.

Today it’s a tourist attraction and damn it...I have the t-shirt to prove it!

 

We caught a ride at night slipping past the blockade on a fishing boat of a friend who worked for the Resistance in the area. Myrika had a full backpack full of black and white film ready to capture those occupation Kodak moments  in the best tradition of Dorothea Lange whose photos of the Depression Era gave a human face to the misery and plight of the Dustbowl devastation of the human spirit and soul.

 

I had my notebooks and portable typewriter and paper ready to write the great American novel as the LSD version of Upton Sinclair. Olivia (who had Cherokee blood in her)  and her Canuck lover were ready to do whatever they had to do to help the cause. Danny Two Horse, Kaylee and the Native entourage we had picked up were there to add muscle to the takeover if need be. Hell, we had already survived an FBI shoot out back at the rez, we were old pro’s by now ready to take on the 7th Cavalry.  

 

It would turn out to be a defining protest in our lives. Along with ourselves we would eventually be joined by Jane “Barbarella” Fonda, Marlon “the Wild One” Brando, Anthony Quinn, Dick Gregory, Buffy St Marie and yes...Jonathan Winters! Even more interesting was the fact that Creedence Clearwater Revival gave the Occupation $15,000 to buy a boat, aptly named, Clearwater to transport people and supplies to the island.

 

We were underway on the dark waters of the night time bay, holding Myrika close to me, she holding me as we became one facing more adventure.

“You wanna fuck in a teepee again?” she asked in her best raspy Kathleen Turner voice.
I happily replied “Of Course!”

“Good,” she said with a grin. “If you would have said NO, I’d have to scalp you where it counts and you’ll never wax your woody again!”

 

Damn I love this woman!!!