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

had IRA ties and had to hide out in the melting pot of New York. He was one hell of a writer and fancied himself the next George Bernard Shaw. Limericks with a degree of tongue in chic tongue in cheek bawdiness were his specialty when not writing his novel regarding sex crazed Catholic  leprechauns from Ulster or the Easter Rebellion.

The rest of gang was an assortment of both genders and cross gendered cross dressers, bisexual street hustlers and young male and female  junkies who had certain other talents from the artistic to the carnal pleasures and  ready to go to bed with man or woman or both which suited the rest of the group perfectly. “I’ll trade you two haikus for an ass fuck!”

Soon the acid took center stage in my mental theater  massaging  me with  fingers of hallucination. I transported to a  vacant alley while empty eye sockets stared at me. Soon was in a grey building could now eavesdrop on those silent screaming voices a mental wards  victim’s head. Victims imprisoned in wheelchairs, straightjackets and hopped up on narco midnight pills while  injections of sweet dreamy morphine ran like a river.  

Soon I was aboard a clipper ship circumnavigating  Polar Ice Caps, past giant icebergs, round and round the Cape we go, circular explorations they were, easy to negotiate, except for those 90 degree corners of fleeting reality that appeared only as more hallucinations obscuring what they really were.  I found a broken mirror in my stateroom but it only  fired back olfactory warning shots over my  head and as I ducked I could see the pile of neon lipstick tubes lying in the bottom of an empty William Holden swimming pool, empty except for Holden floating on top with a bullet in his back, on the fading estate of old Sunset Boulevard. The drugs finally shielded me from the visions of bright lights emanating from a very secretive Left Bank French underground, thick with homosexual transexual mascara that penetrated deep into the bowels of the cabaret underworld of a bereft Berlin.

Finally the party settled into a studied quiet, as Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” rotated suggestively on the turntable. Soothing us and creating an atmosphere ripe for sexual forays as we all paired off in the dark of the 3 A,M. wee small hour of the morning. Olivia was asleep early as she didn’t drink or do drugs...ever. “Just as well” Myrika said. “She cares for that child, your child, I guess OUR child, the three of us.” She was right. A  Sixties child of our private little family unit.

Soon the highways would call to us...luring us west as sure as  Greek Sirens lured ancient sailors to a rocky reef and death. In fact, there would be no Sirens awaiting us. Instead a mixture of Wonderland and OZ  and a utopian lamasery called Shangri-La.

Tonight however, Myrika and I floated to our bedroom and there we made love until the first blazing ray of sun rose over Hudson River. With each  movement of our well oiled sweating bodies against each other in harmony and wet unison, I could picture a naked Salome dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils. We fell asleep in each other’s arms and slept until noon...satisfied and deeper in love….
Chapter 5 - The Hipster Highway

 

Early Saturday morning we loaded up the VW camper bus with canned food, powdered milk, cheeses, wine, marijuana and a small amount of acid stashed for easy tossing should John Law get curious. We also had a ‘57 Buick of a reel to reel recorder of Myrika’s as she wanted to record sounds of the city from whatever apartment we would happen to be living and then using the impatient car horns, voices, sirens, screams, groaning of city buses, clanging bells of cable cars and the Chinese created cacophony of Chinatown's confusing Confucian gongs and dialects. Sounds she would use as background for her improv guitar playing. We also had a practical cargo of flannel shirts for cool evenings, hiking books, cookware, wooden matches, Zig Zag rolling papers, canteens, sleeping bags and of course boxes of Tampons.

We were almost done and ready to get underway by 8 a.m. leaving the Village in the rear view mirror heading west to L.A. and then north along the ghost coast to San Francisco. There we would once again make our nest, thanks to money earned from my drug sales and Myrika’s coffee house gigs.

We decided to straight line it to Chicago first and pick up Route 66, or what was left of it after the Interstate system devoured some portions of the Old Girl. From there….L.A. to check out the scene before heading north to the new Utopia we hoped to find.

San Francisco in our mind, sight unseen would be a perfect alignment of black holes in the impermanent firmament of inner and outer space acting as the Mason-Dixon line between hipster cool and establishment squares. Where we could enjoy the obscene scene we hoped would inject us with hep cat cool getting a rush out of Sahl the Mort, the rabble rousing Rabelais of the atomic revolution while a the past generation of the beat goes spinning way out, far out of groovy Kerouac control plowing furrows of Burroughs allowing the nightlight of nightlife to illuminate those dark wino alley corners hiding it’s stash of hi-fidelity infidelity.

Our VW camper was packed tighter than an expertly rolled joint. In fact with a group of those in need of weed the bus would fill with a cloud of exhaled heaven. We’d pick up the occasional hitchhiker with hopefully a few bucks for gas to help out.

The main problem was driving through some of those farming community small towns. It was like having a bulls-eye painted on you that for some reason attracted every short haired John Wayne cop in every small town you went through, as well as state cops and sheriffs on the main highways who would run interference as they protected this land is not your land longhair, it’s OURS.

Our camper looked like a big fat rolled joint with tires and windows. Someone on a three day acid run would see us and we were sure would try to shotgun the tail pipe. Speed freaks didn’t care for our camper I was pretty sure. . They thought they were evil dragons sent from the past hell bent on eating all the meth available on the street and leaving only granola behind to cook in a spoon to shoot up, which would be like injecting Post Grape Nut Flakes into your veins. You could sell a handful of Fruit Loops to a speed freak by telling them they were hand painted Dexedrine pills laced with Darvons and Bella Donna and they’d go cuckoo for Coco Puffs!

We were ready to sail the asphalt seas in our own Yellow Submarine (Captain, Captain, Full Speed ahead!) Across the American Heartland following the trails first blazed by Kerouac and Cassady, the Lewis and Clark of finger poppin’ on the road dharma bum road trips. We be left with an indelible impression of America by the time we made “landfall” in Los Angeles.

The nights were crisp with soothing cold air, night air, open windows, Olivia’s rosary hanging like a bobblehead of Jesus on a cross from the rear view window, cool air supplied by the cool night, a jazz cat in Harlem kind of cool, sunglasses in the dark, dank room at 1 a.m. wee smalls kind of cool. The open road, opens wide, as Kerouac's ghost rides shotgun with us next to a manic Neal heading west coast blues west on asphalt trails tanked up and gassed up and jazzed up with a full tank of gas and an AM radio to amplitude us through the night with bouncing signals traveling like bullets ripping through flesh in the night

Midwest America, 1967 ..it hasn’t changed much even today. Long stretches of corn and haystacks, some square, some round, grain silos dot the landscape, corrugated metal skyscrapers reflecting the shine of the full prairie moon, saucers from another planet ready to take off, dominating a small agricultural town, rich in ag, poor in culture.

 

Radio station farm reports, drawling voices slow on the draw, folksy wisdom spewing forth like milk from a cow’s full udder. Some little piss ass station creeps into the dial position and it's some Friday night football game between two teams you've never heard of but damn it, one team won a championship in 1956 and their name is on the town water tower to prove it. It's small town gospel once you've made it to the water tower. It's a veritable Book of Revelations that the town swears by.

Stopping off for bite to eat in the Middle of the Midwest we’d stop at our share of burger and booze joints just as a horseshoe pitching contest gett underway at a place with a parking lot full of pick-up trucks and mud and gravel and half a flickering neon sign that says "Bar" where they sponsor the local little league team with mismatched shirts and dirty ball caps and that guy’s wife carries on with that girl’s husband when given the opportunity, in between the shots and rack 'em ups of the ladies pool tourney, then they drink and smoke, flirt and touch and end up in the parking lot in the front seat of a pickup truck with bra and panties removed, followed by orgasm and finally by regret and fear of discovery and reprisal.

Saturday ends drunk, and Sunday begins with a hangover...and then...fire meets brimstone, and the faithful cram into a wooden church no bigger than an outhouse to praise the Lord and grab the brass ring of atonement..for those shut in, as they are called, there is the radio. Along with the grain silo's every now and then..the tower of a lonely AM radio station sitting just off the dirt road somewhere where Swap Shop is king and you can sell dogs, tractors, winches and tires. The polka show airs on Sunday morning, right after the church service (paid for by the congregation).

Just because it's Jesus, there ain't no free pass...even in radio!

Chapter 6 - The Blue Coyote

Our camper bus, lovingly christened “The Blue Coyote” after a song Myrika was writing, was groaning past Chicago on old highway 66 and heading south through the amazing fields of maize and cows that define Illinois. Soon