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

safety. I was bandaged by Olivia  and began in time to come around to a fair level of lucidity and refused to go to the hospital for further treatment.

During the battle still raging we left by the stores  back door  utilizing the alleyways to blaze our own Northwest Passage to the safety of our small apartment. My head was throbbing. Pistons pumping pain as though I was a railroad spike being set in place by John Henry himself.

“You know Myrika, it’s only gonna get worse...I say we make plans now and get to San Francisco. They have a music scene you can get into I’m sure and someone up there probably can use a hack writer. Besides...it’s not safe for Olivia and sure as hell don’t want Joey coming home from the jungles to do battle on the Normandy Beach of L.A.!!”

We all three greed hap, hap, happily...soon we would leave Southern California with its Mouse named Mickey to a land inhabited by white rabbits and grateful deads.

Chapter 12 - White Rabbits and Purple Haze

 

 

 

 

 

 

White Rabbits and Purple Haze

If you're going to San Francisco....leave the driving to us....
There was  something intoxicating about cruising  the coast highway loaded on a variety of uppers and good Mexican grass, similar to the feeling experienced after consuming and downing a cheap bottle of bum wine. Myrika summed it up best, “You know Mikey, this coast highway, its like being in a suppository working it's way up north through California!”

I told you she was the creative one of our merry trio.

Night was falling, the sun was sinking, and all three of our hearts were racing. Leaving L.A., hey, hey. That in itself filled us with the joy  a person who has just experienced an epiphany of life-changing proportions. The sight of the silver full  moon high in the sky over the Pacific Ocean at night was surreal and real at the same time.

The camper  talk subdued to murmurs soon enough.  Amazingly how people, can in time dissect their lives open as though frogs in a high school science lab. Guts and all. Soon, the talk subsides, the highway lights and traffic thin and dim as we sped along the beach coast of California. Modern day Joads searching for the green grass beyond the invisible mountains.

Droning silencio of midnight...the ho-hum hum of  rubber tires gripping the roadway, followed by a gentle rocking to-fro motion of the loaded camper riding the asphalt range mile after concrete mile, and all is quiet on the far western front. The ride pursued a course of magnetic compass needle north, up the coast road, past Monterey, where Steinbeck got drunk and wrote and won a Pulitzer prize writing about displaced Okies, dustbowl storms and rivers of immigrants setting sail on the high seas of Highway 66.

We three  young people were on a similar voyage to a better life.  Me as Tom Joad, Myrika the gentle Buddha poet, and Olivia, the Madonna

The coast was swept with wind, bent trees yearning for the horizon twisted like old crones who have lost their hair and their youth, trying to reach out for the past but never within reach.

L.A. had long ago  receded on the riptide of asphalt as the camper rode the crest of the wave to San Francisco.

The first golden sliver of dawn was rising over the Sierra's to the east. The snowy mountain tops  visible from that distance with the sun bathing their still snowy peaks in morning glow, just as it did to the sandy coastline of California. San Francisco was not too much further north while Olivia and Myrika began to stir from a deep slumber  The stirring was a gentle awakening to a new dawn.  Myrika sleeping next to me in the front seat with her head on my shoulder. We were  all three young souls, not lost, not found, exploring and finding, in our own personal age of discovery, discovering each other and the world at large and at small.

As the broken day of daybreak broke, San Francisco was looming in the foreground. Due north, the compass spun wildly, wobbly, and eventually gently rocked back and forth on its pivot and settled straight ahead deadhead dead-a-head towards San Francisco.

Soon we were in the city watching the  bay roll by, like an old drunk falling down concrete steps, and soon, her majesty majestically welcomed the the wandering waifs into the protective cloak of the folds of her satin gown.The camper inched itself around her outer city edges before penetrating her high-rise inner canyons, then finally, in an asphalt orgasm, the camper went deep into her , and with a sudden shudder,

We stopped near the Marina District...more beach….I  reached inside the camper, grabbed our back packs,  then we walked  into the foggy, but clearing morning of our first city by the bay day.

San Francisco was the white washed, Victorian art colony of poets, writers, prophets, painters and other ungodly un-gods. The fog was patchy, but you could see sunlight in the fabric of that breaking patchwork quilt with holes punched in it to give a striptease peek of the feather dancer hidden behind the curtains.in a private fantasy booth leered at by dockworkers with coats over their laps who've been in the shipping holds too long coming down with hangovers, a hangover from breakfast at the little bar on the wharf. in an area they called the "fish docks."

The Bay Bridge view from the Embarcadero was an erector set of heavy metal steel girders. If it were human, it would have powerful biceps moving traffic  along on upper and lower decks, blood flowing into the heart and back out again, cars as silly putty in a sea swarming with tail-lights like little fish feeding on kelp turning a vein of fluid traffic as thick as plasma, inching along to go to work, go back home, and die eventually, with most life spent in traffic jams listening to Stefan Ponek on KSAN radio.

Even the traffic nuances of noise were different from those of southern California, where it was frenetic with short circuits, yet in the  north of California's golden mane, it was gently rolling like two bodies in a waterbed in heat, and in motion, going up hills and down hills, as you topped a concrete peak and began a motorized descent, the bay laid out in front of you, a geographic paint by numbers.

We walked across the busy thoroughfare of Market Street and past a trolley car station where tourists lined up, an Upton Sinclair portrait of Chicago packing houses at the turn of the century, where immigrants toil in filth, livestock blood and brains, but these were vacationers, this time waiting to board the ultimate symbol of the city, it's trolley, it's tourist tiara. In the distance there was Lombard Street, a plumbers snake of a street, making it's way down the automotive tobbagon hill, one way away from heaven, downward towards the direction of hell, past garden courtyards, sweet, fragrant gardens wafting as you weaved on a downard spiral to the base and eject somewhere near North Beach. Coit Tower standing phallically erect, from any position in the city.

LA had a gasoline and oil smell to hit, along with a smoggy smugness to it. San Francisco, on the other hand, had marked its neighborhoods with the scents of foods. Chinatown, Tong-town, Mexi in the Mission District, Korean and Japanese in their quadrants, bbq in the Fillmore and of course, the delightful dago scents of North Beach. The North Beach District was beats, boobs and booze. Tit's and poetry mingled with the prose of topless dancers who performed their own kind of literary ass art with thongs disappearing in their backsides and tassels sparkling like the Fourth of July pink and brown, nipples large and small, each one dancing tirelessly, erotically and with a faint smile on their faces and fainter traces of beaded sweat, as sweet as honey, running down their upper inner thighs, a sensuous waterfall cascading in rivulets from a topless tropical forest.

Daytime uppers and nighttime downers.San Francisco's sensory overload was dizzying, The bay sparkled brilliantly as the sun assumed it's lofty place in the sky above all else on its hydrogen powered solar throne. As it rose, it drew arching angles, as it did, it deepened the hues of the waters blues and greens.

There were parks with flying kites in them with strings held fast in little hands. One park, the Washington Square park, had music, people lying on blankets, harmonicas and guitars playing and people in animated conversations. The big church across from the park looked over everything protectively, a benevolent dago old world Godfather, and as it was a Sunday morning, parishioners were exiting the church newly sanctified, confessed and saved  for another week. A religious tune-up by catholic mechanics who hoist you up on the rack and inquisitively pry into your sinful deeds of the week of the weak, checking to make sure your brakes are in good working order to avoid a head-on crash with mortal sin...venials are ok, minor damage, but mortals..look at the word itself…

We spent the day exploring  and decided that night to sleep on the beach at the marina behind large rocks where we wouldn't be noticed. Camping out in the city is no different than tossing a sleeping bag on the ground. We had a mess kit, plenty of matches and there was plenty of kindling about for a small fire that wouldn't attract attention, or at least not a lot of it. So as the day headed for it's demise, and the night would take over we set about setting up camp on the beach on the bay to watch the sunset set, the stars appear in the sky overhead one by one, and the city itself with it's diamond lights coming on the darker it got, it's own form of stars twinkling, then the dance of Aphrodite as the fog enveloped the city protectively at the end of the day.

Tonite we would eat, Myrika and I would make love in the fog, and sleep as children do. Tomorrow, we would awaken, pack up and hit the beach...North Beach, where the beat goes on with offbeat poetry howling at the heels of Ginsberg...all ready now to herald in the tie-dyed Sixties that was about to emerge and overpower and meld with the beat generation. beatniks battening down the hatches in North Beach as the Hipsters of the Haight were about to mutiny and take over the ship...sailing it into the waters of protest, LSD and Vietnam.

Chapter 13 Body Counts