Here is a story I never thought I would write. A friend is a writer/editor. She has read some of my stories and said I should create a fictional character and drape my life on him. She said a memoir only works if you have interacted with famous people. With Oliver Stone’s biopic of his charging Clay Shaw and others with conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, he qualifies as famous.
My interaction with him? He illegally risked my life when he lied to me about the situation I was in. I was a student at Tulane University.
The real irony of this story is that I wanted to go to Reed College in Oregon. My father took one look at Reed. It was 1966.
“No way are you going to go to some hippie commune!”
Little did he know I was already smoking marijuana! If he had let me attend Reed, none of this would have happened.
First some background. I went to Coral Gables Senior High School in Miami. It was right next to Coconut Grove, Greenwich Village South, the Southern Terminus (Key West will argue with that) of the counter cultural movement in the sixties. It was not difficult to have already been using marijuana and psychedelics before graduating.
As far as those being gateway drugs to the use of hardcore addictive drugs, not one of my friends, nor I (even though we knew people doing cocaine and heroin) had the slightest interest in trying them. For us their use opened Huxley’s “Doors of Perception” as a the dimension of our curiosity about life, the universe and everything (Apologies to Douglas Adams).
There are some things you have done in your life you would give anything to still have a copy of? I was in the high school band. In uniform in Miami, we sweated our way through every football game. The school’s alma mater was always played. I wrote a parody. Snuck into a classroom to mimeograph a few hundred copies (another way to get high in the 60’s – those fumes!). We spread them among the stands during a game. Then our whole side of the stadium sang:
“On Miami’s southern border
Rimmed against the sky
Smoke is rising from our pipes
We’re Coral Gables High.”
On Monday, J.J. Norton, our famous principal, came on the PA system and warned about trying it again because “you will get caught.”
So here I am at Tulane, Dad’s choice, a very Jewish school with just one Jewish fraternity, TEP. Our slogan: “TEPS are TOPS”. No, we were literally the Animal House of Tulane.
I was a naïve, foolish young idiot. One night the campus radio station was discussing marijuana. There were no cell phones in those days. Did I even consider that if I called from my room the extension could be identified by the college switchboard? Nope! Some science whiz! In those days the ETS AP tests were a much tougher and not part of every honors high school students’ curriculum. A biology and a physics teacher in high school taught the courses as volunteers after school. I earned 8 semester hours in Biology and 8 semester hours in Chemistry. With my participation in the Lab Research Program in high school, my NSF grant to study organic chemistry in Rochester the summer of my junior year, placing in the top three of the Florida Science Talent Search (Gross Morphological Changes, Teratology of Drosophila Melanogaster, from exposure to sublethal doses of organophosphorus pesticide – I used malathion) and a semi-finalist mention in the Westinghouse National Science Talent Search (look at the appendix for the details of this), you would think I would know a little bit about phone systems. Before I was off the phone the Vice Squad was at my door. Search warrant, hah! They opened every door in the dorm and rounded up quite a few of us based on illegal searches of our rooms, under the guise of universities being “In Loco Parentis” in those days.
Spent the night in lockup. The next morning a couple of suits came to escort me to an office. Yeah, Jim Garrison’s office. I am sitting in a chair across from him; they are sitting to the right of me. When he asked them if I had been read my rights, and they said “No” it should have been all over right then and there. The Miranda decision had come down from SCOTUS that previous June. Five months later cops stil didn’t have their little cards to be sure they got reading your rights correctly.
Garrison knew that what he did next was a complete fraud and probably a felony on his part. Try Reckless Endangerment of a Minor. They knew I was the marijuana supplier of my fellow students. I had a contact in the French Quarter from my Miami connection.
“We’re not looking to put college kids in jail. You help us get the dealers and we’ll drop all the charges on you and your friends.”
There’s the lie. Those charges wouldn’t get past the non-Miranda disclosure during an arraignment. I’ve never thought of myself as a brave person. I do not know what I might have done if I really understood the risk. Decades later in Tallahassee, the police had a 23 year old young lady, Rachel Hoffman, do just what I did in exchange for her getting off a drug charge. Her dealers were not liberal hippie freaks like mine were. She was murdered in the botched drug sting on May 7, 2008 .
Garrison sent me, an underage 17-year-old, into the French Quarter, shadowed by 2 Vice Squad narcs, to identify the dealers. One night, Lucky, the commune leader, who I had even had meditation sessions with (remember – hippies) came to me and said,
“We know what you are doing. That’s a good way to get your bootstraps cut, leave.”
Sixty years later, I have no problem remembering his last words. I had failed to save my fellow students from Angola State Prison, which of course Garrison knew they had no right to send us to. I walked out into the dark, deserted street of the early AM French Quarter, right across for the famous Café Du Mond, raised my arms to the sky and screamed. My shadows came and got me thinking I was having a bad acid trip. They took me to a psychiatric hospital where I was pumped full of Thorazine. The hospital figured out who I was and called my parents. Dad consulted with my mother’s Uncle Jack in NY, who told Dad to go and get me out of there. Years later I understood what he risked. Aiding and abetting the Interstate flight of an accused felon. If he had been caught, I am sure that the Feds by then knew the Miranda rule.
Many years later, between her ages 13 and 21, my older daughter was a mess. She wanted me to leave her alone. I told her
“Your Grandpa Leon didn’t give up on me, and I’m not going to give up on you.”
I do not know if I ever explained that to her. Maybe reading this now she’ll understand.
An afterword: some people have questioned the veracity of some of what I have shared. Wrestling the alligator for one. I asked if they had ever known me to be anything but truthful. No, they hadn’t. I even have trouble believing some of the things I have been through in my life!