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

ahead St. Louis where the Cardinals were gearing up for the ball season  minus Stan Musial. It was spring 1967 in America and baseball was still the national pastime.  

We spent three days on the road until we finally hit Oklahoma and the wide open road in the path of Woody Gutherie and Will Rogers. We’d been sleeping on the sides of roads, but now we were in the land of campgrounds, peyote and the ghost trails of Geronimo. Eventually we crossed the border into New Mexico’s enchanting pastels and Myrika was composing  photographs with her keen eye  aided by her Leica rangefinder camera. She was one with that machine as she was with her guitar. Olivia kept resting as the baby grew inside her, and we did everything to attend to her comfort.

LA was dead ahead. There was a scene happening there we wanted to inhale and absorb before heading north to the promised land of San Francisco. Southern California, is the Pacific coast playground of the rebel without a cause hot rod car culture and Surf City, where, the Beach Boys had promised not to long ago that  there are two girls for every boy. The City of Lost Angels, home to lights, cameras, action! Hollywood! The Sunset Strip!

San Francisco to the north, is where Haight Ashbury was the gravitational center of a new spiritual and political universe spinning out of control in a psychedelic orbit. California Dreamin' was becoming an eight mile high rolling paper reality with it's non-stop influx of youthful immigrants from the middle west middle class seeking an upbeat Upton Utopia that turned out to be as disorienting as an opium dream at best.

In two more days we finally  arrived in Death Valley, in California  near the end of the day so decided to park it and camp it. In those days you could pretty well just pull off the side of the road and set up our rustic version of Xanadu and rule the realm. We made it to Bad Water which is about the limbo pole low as you can go in the continental United States at a basement foundation depth of 282 feet below sea level.

We unloaded the sleeping bags, cook gear and food, along with one of the kites Olivia brought with us, three bottles of wine and flannel shirts for later in the evening and a pit dug in the sand to sufficed as fire pit. I  got the camp stove fired up, black beans and rice ready to be transformed into the eighth wonder of the gastronomical world and as the sun began to set we started the small fire, broke out Myrika’s  guitar and my harmonica,  strumming away on her  Gibson to her own tune, and me playing along on harmonica, as best I could, to a desert blues tune she was creating. We also  smoked a few bowls of NYC weed, who the hell ever knew where it came from. Harlem most likely so all and all...pretty righteous, brother.

Sunsets have a mystical sense all their own, but a desert sunset framed by the changing hues of the  mountains is a Billie Holiday command performance at Kennedy Center. We talked and at times, not talked for timeless hours witnessing the sky darken itself into coal black, revealing the stars turned on as stage lights on opening night, filling the galactic auditorium with a band of diffused light that crossed the sky.

The Milky Way was now Broadway and we had balcony seats for the big show. We heard the first note of the coyote chorus around 11pm and Myrika dashed for her tape recorder, which was one of those old, solid as a '57 Buick reel-to-reel portable jobs with pro model microphone, and watched her as she hoped for the best in capturing the call of the wild.

The rest of the evening was spent emptying the cheap bottles of wine, watching the dying embers of the fire and basking in the glow of the camp lantern hung on the open side door of  the Blue Coyote..

Myrika and I opted for  sleeping on the desert floor that evening with it's surrounding silence, organic surface and night scents enticing as a fine wine. Yes, life is a cabaret old chum, but it's also at times a delightful Cabernet. By the way, we never did fly that kite that night.

One of the highlights at night was the influx of AM radio signals that reached out across the dial like the tentacles of an analogue octopus. Fading in and out, one in particular was a strange gumbo of country, gospel and preachers. "Mansion in the Sky" would segue into "Walking the Floor Over You" by Ernest Tubb followed by a real fire and brimstone preacher whose voice would break as he hit crescendos in his plea to his audience to seek salvation.

We all were in a pleasant frame of mind...the music stopped….I turned off the radio truck driver call in show and fixed the sleeping bag Myrika and I would share. While I was getting our bedding ready she had shed her clothes and was dancing on the soft sand, the full moon caressing her young body as it glistened invitingly in the moonlight with a background chorus of coyotes howling their approval, or so I imagined laughing. She certainly had mine. She was as intoxicating as the day we met. Our bodies firm and sweating  in creative love making. When it came to sex...she had a Masters Degree. Her bodily scent was  Honeysuckle and Lavender all rolled into one. When I was making love to her it was a Garden of Hedon!

We made love in the moonlight...and I was permanently fixed her orbit. I was at her command. Even the coyotes seemed to obey her on cue….soon we fell asleep in each other’s arms, flesh to flesh, our sweat and scents melding together marking each other as a wild animal marks it’s territory. We were one in perfect lustful harmony.

Tomorrow...the sun will rise...and L.A. would wait to swallow us whole…...
Chapter 7 - City of Angels

 

 

In the hazy mental  gauze of the post-acid morning we packed up the camper  after a breakfast of cheese and bread along with strips  of beef jerky Myrika had created back in New York. She was as good in a kitchen as she was in bed. We made sure Olivia ate the apples and other fruits we had thought to bring along to feed  her and my fertilized baby seed growing in her warm safe womb. We also made sure she had all the powdered milk she could drink.

 

We would miss the austere surreal environment of the desert surrounded as we were with the sweet sounds of silence and the backdrop concerto of coyotes howling animal arias from the surrounding foothills. It was a soft pastel setting of peace and contentment. If the desert could be likened to a soft tranquil painting by Monet, L.A. would prove to be a jumbled mixed up portrait by Picasso.

 

“We’re packed Baby,” Myrika called out loudly in hopes of hearing an echo bounce and reverberate off the walls of the Panamint Mountains that graciously allowed us to share the deserts contentment. “Alright, let’s get on the road. I’d like to make L.A. by tonight,” I answered. I got behind the wheel still on edge and wondering…were the authorities after me yet for not reporting to duty. Silly question. The war machine always needs fodder to feed itself! The trip actually took two days as I could push the old VW camper very hard so spent the first night after Death Valley in Victorville at a mom and pop campground. We had picked up two hitch hiker along the way who had no money but shared their week with us. In fact when they got off in Barstow we gave them a few bucks to hold them along the way on their way to Bakersfield to the north.

 

Joey was due stateside from Vietnam in 3 months so we wanted to be settled in San Francisco, Frisco, SF, Ess Eff, whatever you call it by then, but first a couple of L.A. to check out the music scene. Maybe I’d get some interviews of groups emerging and write a piece or two for the  Village paper I wrote for back in the city for the hell of it.

 

After two day we finally arrived in the City of Angels. LA revealed her perfectly milky urbane breasts. Each one a giant crystal ball that required gazing, fondling and rapt attention. The breasts also acted as mammarial maps with each perfect mound a 3-dimensional, perfectly round topographic map, showing the underground system of the city, backing up with strange human sewage of pill poppers and train hoppers, junkie's and junkettes, whores and queers. Hustler's and hookers with too much eyeliner.

 

Mere human facades covered in cosmetics resembling ghetto grafitti. with bleeding psyches escaping  into the noir mist of night alleys, tripping over the wino's lying on asphalt beds with broken bottles for pillows.

We found out soon enough that the mean streets of LA have a beat, cadence, all their own. Keeping time to a combination of improvised jazz notes, that lead, not follow. It's arms and loins spread wide to welcome the uninitiated and eat you alive, dangerous sex you can't avoid with a crucifix or morals. Quicksand drawing you in deeper, deeper yet into a cold, damp bottomless well of vice.

Southern California was also hotrods and surfboards, beach bums and beach bunnies, The Pendleton shirt, the frat shirt, and penny loafers were worn with pride during beach blanket bingo's with lot's of bongo's on the beach keeping time with the pounding surf as the California sun would set gently below the Pacific horizon. Beach bonfires roar to life, accompanied by small transister radios and even bigger radios with big songs filling the California night. The Little Surfer Girl was proclaimed Queen of the Beach, while the Midnight Cowboy was stranded in the fog of New York streets.

I laughingly claimed later on an acid high in Haight Ashbury taped by Myrika on her ever present reel to reel  tape recorder held deep in the underground of our corner apartment to have tripped out on acid with Huxley and Hoffman and I  saw walking and talking brooms while on purple double dome. This whole psychotic episode explains why a mouse, a talking one albeit, would make friends with a sputtering duck with no pants. I also jokingly claimed to have banged Betty Boop at a cartoon bangers ball. Step right up, I began yelling as  a carnival  barker, "There is no admission charge at the doors of perception...it's all free to a willing and paying public, as long as they're buying it, and the best part, ladies and gentlemen, all perceptions come without a guarantee, just "as is." is all, so buyer beware, very aware."

We would spend a day traveling along Santa Monica Boulevard, shooting out to sea, see, the ocean blue, where the highway ends and Pacific poetry begins, her gentle waves a sonnet on the sand. Her riptide was her heartbeat and her surf, her