Chapter 3

 Brain was later to take the cheapest trip I ever heard of when he took one dollar, faith in hippies and humanity, and headed to New Orleans where he stayed in the French Quarter.  From there he went to Kansas City, then to Washington DC for the Moratorium and the riots, then to Boston and back home.

Brain and I took a trip to Tampa once to see an anti-war demonstration.  He was big on the anti- war movement, I was thankful for a high draft number.  We took a six pack and a bag of refer and headed for Tampa in his VW.  When we arrived he wanted to march and finally talked me into it.  I marched for a couple of minutes but it didn't sit right so I walked off and watched from the sidewalk.  Brain finished the march and felt like he had made a statement.

Brain and I had a friend I shall call the Snozz who had impregnated his girlfriend, married her and lived in a trailer near several 40 acre fields.  We would go out there on Friday nights and play poker, drink, smoke refer, and occasionally shoot bull bats.       A bull bat is a small bat that comes out at dark to feed on the insects flying around.  Their erratic flight makes them exceedingly hard to hit.  Brain would usually borrow my single shot 20 gauge, I would have my 12 gauge automatic and Snozz would have his double barrel 12 gauge. 

A hail of shot would fly through the air as the blast of shotguns rolled through the woods.  The bull bats would dip and swerve, chasing their evening meal until the noise and commotion drove them off.  Shouts and talk floated across the field.   

Sometimes we would take a break and walk back through the tall grass to the trailer to partake of inebriants, returning later for another try.  Some­times we were too toasted.  At times, a blanket of fog would move in, protecting the bull bats from our youth.  Two or three bull bats per box of 25 shells was all we would usually get. 

His wife wondered why we had to shoot the bull bats, we thought about it for a while and came up with the fact that they had cussed at us as we rode in one night.  We got a big kick out of that.  She began to wonder about our sanity. 

Brain had a cabin near his parent's house where we would sit around discussing life, drinking wine beer or whatever and smoking reefer.  We listened to the music of the day, Bob Dylan, Jethro Tull, Blind Faith, played chess and the oriental game of Wei-Chi, bitched about our mothers and talked about everything under the sun.

Brain once wrote a poem about his seed and worried that his mother might  find it and have him by the psychological balls for life.  Brain had hang-ups about masturbation and worried about putting his seed into the garbage. 

I've never had a problem with masturbation, which has been referred to as exercising the trouser snake, pulling your pud, choking your chicken, making cyclops cry, spanking your monkey or honking the magic goose.  

It always seemed to throw Brain that I could freely admit to jacking off.  Brain fought the good fight but occasionally broke down and gave in to the sins of the flesh with himself.  He once fervently stated,

"Sometimes you just gotta!"

                              **

When you look back, some of the things you did were just good fun and some were exceedingly stupid.  In the exceedingly stupid category Brain and I took a couple of awards.  While attending the Community College I had gone to see Brain in the cabin and he had said something that I didn't like.    

I don't remember the complete event but he said I threw the empty vodka bottle at his head, smashed a table and took off in my car. Even drunk I wasn't stupid enough to tackle Brain who was a great deal bigger than me. 

I decided that I needed to burn off some steam.  I took my 12 gauge and .45 automatic and went out into the groves and proceeded to cut loose on a garbage dump.  After a half a dozen or so rounds I began to feel rather stupid and went home.  I decided to cut down on my drinking for a while.

Brain was eventually to pay me back. 

After the Snozz and his wife divorced we were drinking in a house full of people where Snozz's ex was getting ready to go out with some guy.  We were all drunk and I and another guy were in the bedroom with her helping her button her blouse.  Brain had the hots for her and was sitting in the living room, fuming, certain I was making out with her.  On our way home we got into an argument about it, he even had worse luck with women than I did.  I was driving his car, I was relatively sober, he had drank a fifth of scotch and was completely gone and still mad about the girl. 

Soon we were in an fight.  He started punching at me and I was trying to block with my right arm.  I sped up to about 65 and told him if he knocked me out we would wreck.  He started punching again and I went off the left hand side of the road on a curve and down into the bushes when I tried to block a punch.  This calmed him somewhat.    

We arrived at my parents house who were gone for the evening.  I went inside and Brain started throwing oranges, yelling about something, saying he would break every window in the house.  I went inside and got my .45 automatic and returned.  He was walking across the yard towards his car saying something about ramming the car into the house so I fired a shot in the air less than 40 feet from him.  He never heard it. 

I decided things were serious if he couldn't hear a .45 automatic go off and retreated inside the house.  He threw an orange through the window and started to come in, I leveled the pistol at him through the window, he told me to go ahead and shoot.  I told him to go home and sober up.  I knew that if he entered in his state of mind he was perfectly capable of pressing the issue until I had no choice but to shoot.  I had my back to the kitchen door and the outside door was five or six feet away.  I retreated into the kitchen, locked the door and was preparing to call the police when he got in his car and took off.  I went over to see him a day or two later and we decided the window canceled out the table and we both decided to lighten up on the booze. 

I Had to make up stories about orange fights and taking a shot at an armadillo but the truth came out in the end.  

                             ****

It was about this time that Cousin Gizzard and I, without consulting each other, decided to grow some pot on the lake front property that our Grandparents owned.  It had already been divided up as to which side my mother would get, which side Uncle Jo would get and, as we wished to maintain plausible deniability, each planted on the other's relatives's property.  We met on a couple of occasions travelling to the lake, he hinted around for sex once but I had put that far behind me.  At first we denied our fields but later agreed not to look for each others plants.

A small part of my crop was lost to Bones and an Ameri-asian  when I broke my vow of silence to myself and showed them the field.  They later went back one day when they were out of refer and took a portion of two plants.  They took the middle of the plants, their reasoning being that they didn't want to take the tops, which have the highest THC content, and screw me out of the best part of the plant and they didn't want to take the bottoms and screw themselves.  They both eventually paid me back though not as much as they took.

When harvest time came I had about 20 plants.  I chopped them and cured them in the woods and then wholesaled most of them to avoid risk, keeping a good supply for myself and the crew. 

  Once when I was tending the field I took a wad of leaves and stuffed it in my shirt and took off for the trailer, probably doing about 70-80mph down a straight stretch of highway.  As I approached Viederville a set of lights came up fast behind me.  Lester Floyd, the Constable, pulled me over.  I shoved the pot down my pants and got out of the car.  He told me he had to run 90 to catch me. 

Standing there listening to Lester, heart pounding, the refer started to move down my pants leg. It started to rain and we had to get inside the patrol car to finish the ticket.  He was writing with his right hand, the pot was moving down my left leg, it is difficult to describe the feeling.  He finished the ticket and I went to the trailer to relate my close call.  Soon the story was around Viederville and eventually got to Lester.  I was very careful around him from then on.

The cabin and the trailer became the main meeting places for quite a while, especially after Snozz's divorce.  At the trailer he would sometimes complain that he missed having a wife to be mean to and once related how, after the child, he had kidded her about not walking around naked as there would be two footprints and a slime trail she was hanging so low.  She had threatened to stab him with a knife. 

She partially blamed us for the breakup of her marriage and certainly had some justification as we were always over there drinking, talking and smoking pot.  She had been wild before their marriage but had settled down and tried to make a go of it though she came from a family with a lot of problems.  Her father was very abusive and both her younger sisters had been ungovernable as had her brother.  I had come close to making love to her younger sister one night when we both slept at the trailer.  We spent the night on the couch kissing and fondling but she wouldn't let me go further.      Later her younger sister became the wild type then married and some thought she might settle down.   She ended  up getting her boyfriend to shoot and kill her husband.  She went to prison for quite a few years.  Her youngest sister became a topless dancer and was shot and paralyzed by another dancer during a fight.  Snozz's ex eventually remarried and was doing well the last I heard, she was the only one in her family to settle down when I lost track of what was happening.

                             ****

I had stopped using speed after less than a year as had most of the others.  Everyone tried to get Bones to stop when we found out that he had a heart condition.  At first we thought people were using the usual scare tactics but found out that he had a twin brother that died at birth from a bad heart and his condition was serious.  After that almost everyone refused to do speed with Bones. 

He said that he stopped but most knew that he had only cut down for a while.  One night he had taken some speed and went out with a  girl he had been talking about making love to.  He felt bad and pulled over to the side of the road and died from a heart attack.  Most of us didn't want to know who sold it to him.

There was a large crowd at the funeral, one of the people who continued to sell to him was there.  The funeral was said to have shaken him and started him on the road to straightening out.  He owns a small business now and has a family.

Bones wasn't the only casualty from the excesses.  Brain finally tried LSD-25 and thought it was great stuff.  He took a second dip into his mind with a hit that was much purer and rode the winds of the unconscious into temporary oblivion.  I didn't get the whole story but it had something to do with the Majorette whom he had a serious crush on for a long time.  Though we were best friends he had ambivalent feelings towards me because he thought I always got the women.       

There was a emotional, rambling, threatening phone call to her and his parents were called.  He was taken to a mental hospital where he decided to leave once they talked him inside.  It took six orderlies to convince him he wasn't going anywhere, it also took a great deal of Thorazine. 

I went to see him later when he was allowed visitors and he could barely talk, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic.  It was a while before they let him out and he had to take medication for some time after that.    He hated psychiatrists for a long time.

While in the psychiatric ward he had become friends with a guy who was to be moved to the State Hospital.  Brain drove up there to see him once, they both felt the same toward the psychiatric world.  The guy hit Brain in the head, stole his car and took off.  Brain eventually got his car back but he couldn't understand why the guy did it.  He would have helped him escape if he had just asked.

After he stopped the medication it wasn't long before he was smoking refer and drinking again.  He didn't try LSD anymore although he did develop a liking for magic mushrooms (Psilocybin) later.  Snozz, Brain and I did magic mushrooms together on two or three occasions, I went picking with them once.  The psilocybin mushroom grows in cow shit and there is a great deal of folklore about how to recognize the best ones and how to prepare them for the best results.  We boiled them in a sock that we made Snozz swear had been washed then drank the water as tea.  They were interesting but I didn't develop an affinity for them the way some did. 

THE BLACK HAIRED BEAUTY

I had known her in high school, a sexy, good looking lady, but thought that she would never be interested in me and had never approached her.  I've always been shy around women.  She was dark haired and sexual with full tits and an aura of sensuality that sent many a young man's imagination into gear.

While I was attending the Community College I had seen her around town and she had been friendly, one day I saw her in the grocery store and asked her to go out.  She accepted.  It did wonders for my ego.

When I picked her up we decided to just go somewhere and talk.  I suggested an orange grove and stopped off and got some beer for myself, she didn't drink.  We parked in the grove in the moonlight and I opened a beer and took a few swallows, we talked for a minute and began making out.  She was a very sexual lady and to this day I can remember how warm she was to the touch.  Her kisses were hot and her hands as eager as mine.  We climbed into the back seat and were out of our clothes in a flash. 

It was fantastic!  She was soon ready for seconds but in spite of her massage I was unable, she had drained me dry in one shot.  I was empty.  She asked me if I had lost respect for her and I told her I hadn't, she seemed worried that I would tell my friends, something I never do.  I asked her out for the next evening and she accepted. 

The next night I was ready to head for the orange grove but she wanted to go out.  I suggested we go to the orange grove first then go out later.  This rubbed her the wrong way and pretty soon there was a fight and she had me drop her at her house, we didn't see each other again.  I was to repeat this experience almost exactly with a friend of hers except that it was a bed instead of an orange grove and she didn't cry until I left.

                             ****

Impotence is an interesting event, or should I say a non- event.  There was a young woman that I went out with on occasion, a troubled girl with a great capacity for drugs.  It was after Grandad had died and I had been staying in the upstairs at Dayu's while going to the community college.

Dayu was in the hospital due to her advancing years and the girl had come over to see me.  We started making out and soon the sofa bed was unfolded.  We were almost completely undressed but the Magic Goose refused to function.  The girl lay there.  The Magic Goose lay there, soft and flaccid.  I wanted to find a hole and crawl into it.  If I couldn't find one I was prepared to dig one but there was no escape.  There was a floor beneath me and I didn't have the tools to chop through it.

The girl lay there, I lay there, the Magic Goose lay there.  Not a pleasant state of affairs.  She was nice about it but it bothered me for some time.  After your first experience you begin to realize that you are a whole and all your parts are connected.  When you aren't in the mood or not with the right woman you might not be able to perform.

This all sounds good but the first time is an experience.

****

There is not much to say about my time at Junior College, I've never been fond of formal education.  My grade point average ranged from a 1.6 to a 3.9 depending on how serious I was.  During one of my more serious terms I even went to a hypnotist to try and improve my grades and it helped. 

During a bad term I managed a D in Humanities which I hated, with a professor I hated,  which is despicable as I had the final exam a day or two before the test.  I acquired it from the Football Player who first wanted to go over it together in private but I told him just to give it to me.  He finally did.  He wouldn't tell me how he had gotten it, I probably didn't want to know.

The test was essay and by this time I hated the little short haired batchelorete so much that I refused to study and ruined what little average I had.  The Football Player made an A, he missed one question on purpose.

For some time after that some of us who had the class would pass a joint and laughingly joke about taking plastic explosives to any statue luckless enough to cross our path. 

Thought for the Moment:  Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine. 

Irwin Edmund  (1896-1954)

                      TRAVELS IN EUROPE

Towards the end of school I worker at a gas station saving money for a trip to Europe that I had been planning.  My parents bought me a Eurail Pass which through the viscidities of fortune had 3 months of train travel rather than two that were paid for.

I finally graduated and off I went with eleven hundred dollars in traveller's checks.  I flew to the Bahamas where I caught a flight one day earlier that scheduled.  I landed in Luxembourg in the morning and sat outside in the grass for a while then started hitchhiking towards Germany; my favorite sister had married an Army Captain and they were stationed at Military Headquarters there.  The first or second ride was in a Mercedes so I was starting out good. 

I got to Heidelberg just as evening came and startled my sister with my long hair.  Adjusting to jet lag was a problem and I was up most of the night.  I stayed around the apartment the next day trying to adjust my schedule and listening to my sister tell of the bomb scares that were going around.

In the evening my brother in law had left on business and I was talking to my sister when an explosion shook the windows.  My sister grabbed her kid and headed to the basement screaming that they were bombing the compound.  I walked to the window when a second explosion rattled the window and I moved to the center of the apartment. 

After things calmed down we went outside to see the damage.  The end apartment in the two story building had its windows shattered and there was shrapnel in the yard, a piece of which I picked up.  The bomb had been in a car and had killed three GI's as they walked by.  The second explosion was the gas tank in the car next to it.  The next day there were police with automatic weapons in front of HQ and it was said the bomb had been placed by the leftist Baeder Meinhoff gang. 

I stayed in Heidelberg for about a week wandering around the city, reading books and making no plans.  My brother in law had asked for the piece of shrapnel to turn in but when I gave it to him he kept it.  He used to hide it when I came to visit. 

I finally decided to take off and went to Paris on the train.  It was impossible to find a cheap room so I took the train out of town at the end of the day until I found some woodlands.  Buying wine, cheese and bread at a store near the station I hiked to a hillside orchard and camped for the night. 

Back to Paris the next day for more wandering around then heading out on the train to Soissons where my adopted father had been shot down by the Germans and hidden by a French family.  My mother had corresponded with them from time to time and they had invited me to come and see them.  They lived in a two story farm house on the outskirts of town and I spent several days there and got a bit emotional at first. 

They took me around the countryside to see a castle and  museum and to  visit relatives, one of whom had an almost complete collection of Elvis records.  The food was great and the wine was good but soon it was time to start moving. 

I returned to Paris and took an afternoon train to Madrid, arriving the next day.  I always stayed in the cheapest hotels I could find and tried to split my time between rooms, camping and sleeping on trains or ships.  I stayed there for several days, visiting the museum and watching a bull fight.  From there I went to Valencia and spent the night on a ship sailing to the island of Ibiza.  I explored the island and spent two nights on a hill then headed back to the mainland the third night. 

From there I went down to Granada to see the Alhambra, the palace of the Moorish kings, which I enjoyed a great deal.  From Granada I went to Malaga and toured the Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. Kennedy then returned to the capitol.

In Madrid I saw another bull fight and had my first taste of fried squid.  From there, to Barcelona and then into France.  Leaving Barcelona I was lucky enough to have an entire compartment to myself on a moonlit night and sat watching the scenery flow by until I fell asleep. 

I went back up through Avignon, spent a night in Lyon, to Strassburg, then to Heidelberg.  On the trip back I was standing at the rear of the train and met two American sisters who were in the last compartment.  The younger one was friendly and we ended up making out for a while before he older sister called her in.  I should have gotten her into the bathroom and tried to make love but he sister was keeping an eye on her.

Taking a break from my travels I saw more of Heidelberg and spent most of my time reading one of Bernard B Fall's books on Vietnam.  I developed an attraction for my sister's young German nanny that lived in the attic room.  A young, attractive brunette, she unfortunately was not attracted to me.

I went to a fair with her but she brought a chubby friend who seemed to like me quite a bit.  Nothing developed for anyone.  They were outgoing fun loving girls who would sometime sing a song about the French Boulevard Champs Ellyse.  They would never tell me the words to the song but apparently it made reference to German troops marching on it again and there were several versions, some more wicked than the others.      

One of the American kids and I spent a day smoking a little hash and riding around Heidelberg with a former soldier who made a number of short stops at numerous houses.  He told us he was just stopping in to drop a message to friends and we acted like we believed it for a while. 

I soon decided to travel again and went to Amsterdam and camped outside the city for a couple of nights.  I bought some bad hash from one hippie in a plaza, had some great food in the restaurants along the canals and caught Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange".    From there I went north to the Scandinavian countries, through Denmark where I fell asleep on the train rolling through the countryside and woke up  and saw a steel wall outside.  I walked outside and found that the train had been put on a ship and we were about to pull out of port.  I celebrated this change of transportation by going to the bar.

I camped in a park in Oslo and headed north past the Arctic Circle to Narvik then down to Stockholm and back to Germany. 

I took a short trip to Munich and saw the Olympic Village and some of the city.  I was hitchhiking back towards Heidelberg when I ran into a Danish merchant marine who had spent too much of his money and was hitchhiking home.  We had lunch at a nearby restaurant and traded stories of the road.  He advised me to go to Dachau and see the concentration camp as it was nearby and I took his advice. 

It was a overcast, rainy day when I toured the camp and the feeling you get is hard to explain, a mental revulsion that such a thing could happened.  I later hitchhiked into Belgium to the American Military Cemetery and spent some time walking among the graves.    

I stayed in Heidelberg a short time and then headed south through Switzerland where I camped on a beautiful hill in a small town on the railway line.   I saw parts of Luzerne and Geneva then headed into Italy.     

At Milan I boarded a train to Venice and upon entering found myself in a special first class train.  Some of the inhabitants looked a bit worried at the appearance of a unwashed long haired guy with a backpack.  Someone told me to talk to the conductor who arrived shortly.  I was informed I would have to leave the train at the next station as my Eurail pass didn't cover 1st class travel.  At least he didn't charge me for the ride.

I arrived in Venice, rented a cheap room and spent several days exploring the  waterways, walkways, restaurants and cathedral.  It was one of my favorites. 

From Venice I went to Rome and saw the Vatican and the Coliseum, then to the east coast to Brindisi on a train filled with Italian peasants.  I slept in a hallway on an overnight boat to Patri in Greece and hitched a ride to Athens with a chain smoking Greek truck driver the next day.  I camped underneath an overpass near the airport for several nights.  I saw some of the city and took a hitchhiking trip to the tip of the peninsula, spending part of an afternoon in a roadside cafe trying to talk to several old men.  The next day I took a flight to Israel that I had booked several days before.

There was a total body frisk going on the plane and again in Israel.  The first thing I saw in Israel was someone outside the   plane with a machine gun.  Taking a bus to Jerusalem I found a cot in an Arab Hotel just outside the Damascus Gate for one dollar a night.  There were four other cots in the room, the shower didn't work all the time and we didn't have hot water. 

I played a game or two of chess with one of the guys and some of us would sit around talking and drinking a clear liquid that turned brown in water.  Perhaps it was ouzo, I don't remember its name but I do remember its effects.  Soon the smell of five unwashed guys led me to move to the roof which only cost me seventy-five cents per night. 

I spent most of the time in the Old City visiting the Great Mosque and taking the tour of the catacombs.  Almost every day I wandered around the dim, winding streets of the Arab Market.

I decided to hitchhike down and see Masada in the Negev desert, the mountain where a group of Jews committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman Army.  I passed the turnoff for Bethlehem but didn't stop as there was no reason to watch Arab peasants take people's money in exchange for religious trinkets.  While I made it to Masada I didn't get to see it.  The lift was broken and though one of the other Americans sleeping in the dormitory tried to wake me for the hike up to the top, I couldn't be budged.

I hitchhiked back to Jerusalem.

Soon I headed north through Nablus, getting a long ride with a father and son who seemed as tough as the land we were riding through.  I went north toward Terveya, often having a hard time getting a ride as a great number of soldiers hitched and they usually got the rides first. 

Stopping at a Kibbutz I had a meal but didn't stay as they wanted too much for a place to sleep.  I spent a night in Terveya, on the Sea of Galilee, missing by several months being able to sit at the shoreline cafes and watch Israeli and Syrian jets dogfights.  When I returned to Jerusalem I met two longhaired Army brats who had a proclivity for taking chances.  The had gone into the bathroom on the plane from Greece and smoked their last joint and Greece and Israel are two places you don't want to get busted for drugs in. 

They had procured some hashish from an Arab youth and we went to find a safe place to smoke it.  We took a right outside the Damascus gate and walked to the cemetery on the edge of the city.  I encouraged them to go deep into the cemetery before smoking, which we did, finding a flat tombstone for a seat.  We fired up the hash pipe and began passing it around.

We speculated on how many tons of hash had been smoked in the hills surrounding us, we felt like a part of history.  We finished off the hash and nothing happened.  They had been taken.  One of the youths said it was probably camel shit and vowed to find the Arab boy and get his money back.  Of course it never happened.

As the time came to leave Israel I developed a case of dysentery which caused me to stay close to a toilet.  I had eaten many meals at an Arab restaurant called Mr. Moustache's and later learned that it had been closed down several times for health violations.  The diaharrea was to be my constant companion for the next two weeks.    Returning to Greece I decided to cancel my plans for a trip to Egypt and to head back north.  As my Eurail pass wasn't good in Greece I decided to hitchhike back to Italy. 

I spent two nights under the overpass outside the airport being awakened one morning by workers who were watering the plants, they motioned me back to sleep.  I slept late as I had gotten up several times in the two nights and done a sort of trot to the airport terminal, arriving there just in time on all but one occasion.

Finally I set out and took a bus from the airport through the city and started hitchhiking.  I used up my toilet paper along the road but found a resort hotel that had actual toilet paper rather than squares of newspaper and took what I thought I would need, thanking the front desk clerk profusely for letting me use the bathroom as I left. 

I went up through Larisia and was thumbing along a stretch of highway when a worker irrigating a field motioned me to join him for lunch.  Neither of us spoke any of the other's language so we eventually gave up on conversation.  The food was good, goats cheese, bread, wine, and tomatoes.  I filled my empty canteen from the irrigation pipe, said what I thought was thank you and headed down the road. 

The next ride was one of the most interesting, with three Italians who were socialist in their politics, one gave the impression that he was outright Communist so we decided to stay off the subject.  We had talked for a short time about the world situation but he had been so vehemently against America that the other two had held a conversation with him in Italian. 

I played the leftist a game of chess on a portable chess board I carried and he won the first game and said something in Italian.  The other two found this humorous and said he felt that he had achieved a victory over capitalism.  We played another which I won and we decided not to play off the draw.

As we approached the border we passed a Gypsy caravan of horses and wagons and speculated on what it would be like to camp with them for a night, there was wild speculation about the women.       We arrived at the border to Yugoslavia where I was given a seven day visa and my bags inspected.  The leftist kidded me about going into a Communist country, he said they might keep me there.    With the Italians complaining on occasion about my need to stop and use the bathroom, we travelled north and stopped for the night at the town of Skopje where we rented two cabins in a resort area.  The next day we arrived in Belgrade, the capitol, where they dropped me off.  I decided to take a train the rest of the way to Italy and saw a little of the city around the train station before I left.  I crossed the border into Italy that night, a long wait while authorities checked passports and searched for border jumpers, and returned to Venice.

The two days spent in Venice, I saw more of the city, occasionally slipping into a restaurant to use the bathroom.  From there I went through the Brenner pass and on into Austria.  I took the tour of the salt mine at Saltzberg and spent the night on a wooded hill near a house, I could hear young boys playing army and shouting heil and heil Himmler in the yard.  Recounting this later some told me that I must have been dreaming but I hear what I heard.

I spent part of a day in Vienna and then returned to Heidelberg where I moved into the nanny's room as she had left.  I spent the time reading and walking around the city recuperating.  Though I still had a couple of hundred dollars with me I decided to head on back to the States.  It had been a three month trip.

Arriving back in the United States, I was soon back to my old routine.

                 THE BLACK HOLE OF THE MIND

A year or so after I returned from my trip to Europe I began to suffer from depression.  At first I did nothing about it, I was told it would pass.  But it didn't. 

If you have never experienced a depression it is difficult to give an exact rendering of the state of mind, it is difficult even if you have, you don't want to remember.  There is a despair and despondency about life in general, almost everything is touched with melancholy.  It has bee aptly described as a loss of self, loss of identity, the black hole of the mind, trying twice to cast a shadow.  You have no rights, no purpose, you don't exist.

Finally I sought the help of a professional.  The first psychologist I saw for only two visits.  I was depressed but his God complex got through the fog I was in. 

Next I tried the county Mental Health Center where I was put under the care of a psychotherapist I shall call PG.  An older gentleman who abhorred the politics of the place, he was one of the best that they had.

At first it was almost impossible for me to talk to him I was so withdrawn but over time I gradually came out of my shell.  I saw him for a long time.  Members of my family told me that I was all right and I just need to settle down with a good job and family.      PG told me my problems had problems.  We spent a great deal of time analyzing situations and talking about double binds and family situations.  He advised me to get out of Viederville but I didn't take his advice.

Thought for the Moment:  The stone fell on the pitcher?  Woe to the pitcher.  The pitcher fell on the stone?  Woe to the pitcher                                         Rabbinic Saying

The depression deepened.  I saw the psychiatrist at the Mental Health Center on several occasions and was prescribed Presamine with Valium to combat the nervousness that it caused.  Between PG and the Presamine and Valium I got back on track.  I went through it several times, withdrawing when I was depressed and then returning to the same old routine when I got better.  At the time I considered myself getting better when I felt like smoking pot again.

I would always get one or two more prescriptions than I needed and flush most of the Presamine down the toilet, keeping the Valium for myself and friends.  On one or two occasions when there was a plethora of drugs in residence at the trailer we would try playing poker using substances instead of money.  We could never agree on how much beer equaled how much reefer equaled how much Valium and someone always wanted to complicate matters by adding a new substance.

Off and on I saw PG over a period of several years and the man did a great deal for me.  He tried to explain my situation and the psychological dynamics of it but there were certain things that I didn't believe.  He said sometimes acceptance of others was more difficult that self acceptance and that I had a great deal to work through.  He told me all I could do was to put one foot in front of the other. 

A mind is a strange thing, most of those who have one have some sort of problem with it at some time in their lives, perhaps one should speak of the unholy trinity of nature, nurture, and the labyrinth of the human mind.  Put a group of minds together and you a network of labyrinth.

At one point I went to a retreat for emotionally disturbed youths for a couple of weeks because I couldn't handle staying at home.  It was a three bedroom house equipped with bunk beds in each room.  We had group therapy almost every day, run by a woman that PG said had as many problems as some of her charges.   

There were two young women there close to my age, a blonde escaping from a battering situation that she kept returning to and a brunette recuperating from a nervous breakdown.  I liked the brunette a great deal more than the blonde but I ended up only making out with the brunette in the woods. 

I later made love to the blonde after we had both left the retreat.  She had rented an apartment and I stopped by to visit one day, in a very short time we were in bed.  We weren't out of bed two minutes before she took herself right down the tubes with remorse, regret and guilt.  She put part of the blame on me for seducing her when she had been perfectly willing and I decided not to be with her again.

I was free of depression for a while and then had another bad one.  I decided to see a psychiatrist this time and picked one I shall call Finefellow who was Jewish.  I went into a half an hour of therapy a week.  I tried Lithium but it had little effect on my depression.  Then I requested shock treatments.  Obviously I was mentally disturbed.   

Finefellow said he would try them and on the appointed day I drove to the hospital psychiatric ward and checked myself in.  I was led through a locked door to a day room to which were attached several bedrooms with three or four beds to the room.      Finefellow stopped by and I was lain on a bed with several people standing by me to hold me during the convulsions.  The machine was plugged into the wall and a piece of rubber with a breathing tube was placed in my mouth.  My temples were smeared with a conducting jelly and the electrodes were placed on me.  I blacked out.

Regaining consciousness I wandered around somewhat confused and spent a great deal of time sitting and staring.  After one treatment I asked when they were going to give me the shock and they laughed and said they just did.

I had three or four treatments but Finefellow said he didn't think they were helping.  I stayed there for another day talking mostly to a girl who was withdrawing from heroin who kept talking about the monkey on her back. 

Back to therapy.  We talked a lot about sex.  Finefellow felt that since I had engaged in homosexual activity during my youth that my depression stemmed from a repression of that side of myself.  I told him that I had tried it and it wasn't going to be a part of my adult life.  We had several discussions on this and I determined we had differing philosophies on life. 

Then one day he said he felt that I should explore all the aspects of sexuality and that this would set me free.  In that low tone of voice that people use when they are getting down to the basics he offered to introduce me to some people that he knew that would help set me free sexually.   I declined to meet them.  There were several more sessions after that but finally he told me I was a psychological hypochondriac and I was taking up space that could be used for more seriously disturbed patients.  

I later mentioned this to PG when I started seeing him again and he later told me that the psychiatrist was known for sometimes having sex with his patients both male and female.  I told PG that I thought a psychiatrist was a psychologist who thought that a homosexual act would cure any problem.  He found humor in that.    He made a call to the psychiatrist and registered his opinion over the suggested treatment.

 I saw one or two psychiatrists and a different psychotherapist at the Mental Health Center but stayed with PG. He helped me a great deal.  A number of terms have rolled off the typewriters and the tongues of mental health professionals concerning me; depressed (various types), inadequate self image, identity crisis, sociopathic personality, bisexual, repressed hostility, no repressed hostility, obsessive compulsive, psychopathic deviant, passive aggressive, neurotic, mother complex, anti-social, addictive personality, potential alcoholic, symbiotic relationship with mother, weak ego structure, mild manic depressive, psychologically unstable.  I've also been labeled misanthropist, misogynist, misogamist, and misopedist but then Iv'e been called a lot of things in life.  Terms are mostly an intellectual game for those making money.

I guess everybody has their own river of crap to wade through and  unfortunately the only choice you seem to get is whether you live on a delta or in a swamp, I suppose that not everyone gets a choice.

I finally came up with my own diagnosis.

I am Mad Dog

Mad Dog is crazy

So fucking what!

Chapter 1   Chapter 2   Chapter 3   Chapter 4   Chapter 5   Chapter 6 Adventures in Belize   Chapter 7   Chapter 8   Chapter 9   Chapter 10

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