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

go along with the clink of change in the coffee can and the occasional rustle of dollar bills floating down into the aluminum well of plenty. I would go around the corner and panhandle enough to score a few joints, a pack of smokes we would all share along with a bottle of skid row’s most fabulous Thunderbird wine. Good for what ails ya!

The apartment was pure dive when we moved in as the former residents, junkies from what we were told, left us with a treasure trove of empty cigarette packs and cellophane wrappers, creating a landfill out of the apartment floor space, along with empty beer bottles with labels partially removed. The kind of removal you do when you're half-ass drunk and start peeling them off half-assed. The kitchen sink was full of greying orange peels, turning into fuzzy grey mold similar in texture to northern exposure moss in a woodland.

I did manage in the weeks to come to buy a record player that was probably stolen. It was a deal...or a steal depending on how you looked at it as the guy I bought it from threw in some Mexican records of Mexican musicians we never heard of with black vinyl grooves filled as full as a giant Rio Grande pinata with Tex-Mex tejano music, with guitars and accordions giving the apartment somewhat of a Mexican-German beer hall sound when cranked up.

I had met one of those Hollywood queens on the street one night and  not being shy engaged him/her in conversation and let him cop a crotch feel for a few minutes in an alley. Anything for a buck. Whenever we needed extra cash Myrika and I would hustle the street and go trolling for dollars.

I took the few dollars I got for holding still and scored a huge bottle of pills from a hipster on Pico Blvd. It was a trophy score!  A Mason jar full in fact, the amount and kinds that truck drivers usually keep next to them on 18 wheel runs from Dayton to Cheyenne, or Memphis to Denver. Yellow ones, and blue ones, and green ones, bennies and little dexies we would  down by the handful and pass around like M&M's except they didn't stand a chance of melting in your hands, but could melt the mind after 72 hours straight running on an empty tank of mental fumes. Taking these and smoking a joint only accelerated the high to a plateau, where you could catch your breath before the next leg of the climb up chemical Everest without breathing tanks or yaks or a trusted Sherpa. A couple of days later, no food in your belly from not eating, your stomach would sucker punch you from the inside and throwing up bile was inevitable. Then you run out of gas, come to a halt and sometimes forget your own name and who you are.

We began selling the pills and made enough to score small bags of weed to in turn sell in small amounts. The drug sales got larger and we got richer and pretty well known and accepted on the Strip for being honest and never shorting anyone.

One night when I returned to the apartment from hustling late at night Myrika yelled from the small bedroom to wait there. She had a surprise. I love a surprise, but this was totally unexpected. My blonde Nordic Viking made her grand entrance. All five foot 10 of her, a real Redwoodesque beauty. My blonde bombshell had morphed! She exited from the bedroom, into the living room.

Strikingly beautiful in a neo-Beat California way, black capri's, straight black hair, (you know that West Virginia coal mine kind of black), cut short, Keely Smith-ish, framed by pure white alabaster skin, as white as those statues found in ancient Greece are white. Her eyes? Yes, two of them, no more, no less, and blue, blue  piercing pools to drown a man alive in.

She looked me  over, up and down, her Bacall to my Bogart, with Olivia her partner in hairdressing crime smiling happily.  Myrika was stark naked  with her long yellow Germanic locks no longer flowing past her shoulder,  smiled, hungrily, flashing pearl and oyster teeth, her hair now dyed jet black and short with those blue eyes contrasting her smile, framed her artwork face, a black and white desert O'Keefe.

She lit up a joint, and passed it to me, I had already smoked three of them on the street and had two of the bennies so I was feeling no pain, and the higher I  got, Myrika became Aphrodite, and it made me, and I could see by Olivia’s face her also,  flesh hungry just looking at her. She put a finger to her lips, shush like, hush-hush, and handed us each a little pill. This one was purple in color, and she held it in her fingers, a high priestess consecrating a holy sacrament, body and blood of Christ and I and Olivia being good Catholics  knew what to do as we knelt before her and stuck our  tongues out without prodding, a very Catholic Dominus Vabiscum move as she placed the holy communion on our  tongues for  to swallow.

The acid took hold amidst the whirlwind of Hollywood and within 20 minutes my  ankles began to tingle and we all decided to hit  the strip after Myrika got dressed where we entered the most amazing light show on earth, well, to us anyway it seemed that way,  The city lights became crystalline, defined, a nebula of giant and dwarf stars. LA had a feel, a smell, more of a scent really, and a spirit.  The Sunset Strip trip was beginning to open like the peeled back top of a can of sardines in mustard sauce. The town that used to belong to Mickey Cohen and the corpse of the Black Dahlia was post-beat-pre-hip and as the colors seemed to blend together, it was all a Dick Tracy yellow viewed on an empty screen of a console TV without a cathode.

Everyone on the street knew us by now. In addition to scoring and selling pot and acid we also sold speed, mescaline, peyote and anything else we could get our  hands on.  

The street cacophony of music, voices, traffic, laughter and radio's was a tonic. It was so vibrant, and as the acid continued its ascent, it was the last piano note of Day in the Life of Sgt. Pepper, it went on for days. I walked holding hands with Myrika and Olivia. Music and radio's, pop music, pop charts, pop goes the American culture, Beatles, Stones, Byrds, Dylan, all rotating in vinyl, blaring from apartments, bars and radios along the Strip The acid was now painting artful brush strokes .

Words lost meaning, and Myrika’s skin took on a sabatier effect, turning her into black and white with not enough pixels, the very same as looking at the color comics in the newspaper with a magnifying glass and seeing each individual tree in the forest. Words spelled themselves out audibly, big black block letters, dangling from participles that dangled themselves from multi-colored hangmen's nooses.
Footsteps were liquid as each step sunk me lower into the ground, quicksand surrounded by killer ants in the amazon and decaying dinosaurs beneath the tar pits. Myrika held my hand tighter as this was a trip aboard LDS airlines. Fasten your seat belt and extinguish all cigarettes. Hold on tight as you fly the friendly skies of blue smiles for miles.

The street was bouncing up and down, keeping time with the heartbeat of the street. It was alive, by Gawd, alive and well. We all felt it  

That night, I was re-born, chemically at least. The back alleys of childhood in Detroit were clear in memory. Those damn invisible pirates, weren't all that invisible after all! They did exist, as  dazzling swashbucklers with big sashes and buckles to swash about.

Back in the apartment around 1 A.M. we were back In bed with the older Myrika  leading the charge into her valley where rode the 600. It was almost morning, and would be one of those LA mornings, orange and hazy, eyes to burn, and it got into your throat making cigarettes taste like shit. The smog was a  shroud of freeway death, of exhaust, of industry, of poisons yet unknown along with the unknown source of it. It was a cloud in a shroud that fill the windpipe and plug it as though it were old lead plumbing pipes with too much silt and sludge built up backing up everything in it's u-jointed path.

I drifted off to sleep after a cigarette I couldn't taste...like a cigarette should...and when I  awakened from a deep sleep, Myrika  was already in the kitchen fixing coffee, toast, scrambled eggs, and a big platter of Canadian bacon. She was stark naked standing there smiling with a wooden spoon in one hand and joint in the other, the acid still in my system, I was about to have breakfast with the acid Aphrodite, the Sandoz Queen of the Amazons, I a mere lilliputian.

She handed me a joint and put some grass in the scrambled eggs along with garlic salt, pepper, and a chopped onion. I  took a puff, and grabbed the cup of coffee and dexadrine she handed me swallowing it down, the breakfast of champions, and Tim Leary would be on the next box of Wheaties!

Chapter 10 - I Buy, You Pay G.I.

 

 

 

“I Buy You Pay, G.I.”
By the beginning of 1967, there were almost a half a million young American troops in South Vietnam along with 800,00 plus  from South Vietnam, South Korea and other allied forces.  America’s civilian and military leaders were starting to think big. This, they believed, would be the year to crush the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies, who had now infiltrated the south.

Joey Russo, could smell the blood in the air, so as all red blooded American boys in uniform needed  to do to relieve the tension he would dive deep into the sexual abyss of anything goes Saigon enjoying the celestial pleasures by plunging into the nightlife of nightclubs where the B-Girl battle cry was “Hey G.I. I buy you drink. I buy, YOU PAY! Add to this the amazing cabarets, massage parlors and whore houses. It was the Land of Asian delights, both diverse and perverse. A smorgasbord of sexual activities unmatched in this or any other universe. Saigon  at night is very much alive. Pulsating music in the clubs, Asian angels gyrating and dancing while the strip club hawkers and black marketeers not to be confused with Mouseketeers or Rocketeers or first or second or third level tiers or even tears for fears. The whole scene makes North Beach at night look like a bad wet dream. Saigon  was the real thing. No rules...and it took no prisoners as an evening of delightful debauchery, followed by a couple hours sleep and then, and he never knew in advance, hit the jungle trails for a recon mission.

In between the sexual foray’s Joey had been training in the art of “Savate” or French kickboxing where his talents in the use