My working title for this book when I started writing it 20 years ago was
Sex, Drugs and Politics: My Life In The Sixties
Part of that was scoring, “drugs”. We did not consider marijuana a drug, but yeah, some of what we took were right out of the Sandoz pharmaceutical lab in Switzerland. My friend Gil had a friend named Irv who lived in the Grove. He had some good stuff. It was right off 32nd Avenue. We were to meet there. I arrived first, and knocked. A voice called out,
“Come in!”.
It was a CBS house with beautiful old Dade County pine floors, but not a stick of furniture in sight. There was however a 55-gallon steel drum in the middle of the living room as you entered the house, with its small round tap hole opened. When I was a child I loved making the models of military planes and vehicles out of gray polystyrene plastic. We used model cement whose main ingredient was an industrial solvent called Toluol. This was the chemical that got glue sniffers high. I had no trouble identifying the chemical fumes emanating from that drum of toxic waste.
These were serious glue heads. They had turned the entire house into a brown paper bag filled with glue. You could just hear the myelin sheaths of their central nervous systems being dissolved on the spot. A voice called “Back here” and that is how I met Irv. Like so many things we all learned later, I do not believe we had any idea how dangerous that was, or I would not even have stayed a minute in there.
Not long after that both Irv and I felt there was nothing left in Miami for us. We decided to go to the City (The Big Apple), where we both had our roots. We had no money, but Irv had 27 hits of Acid which he was sure we could sell to a friend of his going to the University of Georgia in Athens. That money would then stake us for the trip to New York, beyond which we had not thought further! My contribution was my car. I was 18 and Irv was 20. This was March (spring break, doh!), when the weather was quite kind to hippies in Miami. We were not prepared for the worsening weather as we headed some 700 miles north of Miami to Athens. We sure were not dressed adequately for it.
The car was a faded lime-green Ford station wagon. I had seen pictures of Ken Kesey’s (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) Merry Pranksters bus and thought it was cool. I’d carry around my life-long accumulation of model paints used on those polystyrene planes, and hand them out to the hippies wherever we went. There would be crowds of freaks surrounding the car, passing the colors and brushes back and forth. Some worked on their own designs and others cooperated. Some had no talent like me and just helped cover the faded car in pretty colors. Others were as talented as Picasso and Braque. The murals grew and oozed across the car like some psychedelic fungus. I would give anything for a picture of that car now, but having moved so many times in all these years much is lost. By the time we headed to Athens it was half painted. What a concept. Here we were carrying a load of illegal drugs across state lines, into the Deep South no less, and we’re driving around in a vehicle that HAD to be like waving a red flag in front of every Bull nark saying,
“Hey! Look at us! Ain’t we prospects for a stop and search!?”
Maybe I had gotten too much glue into my system hanging around with Irv.
So off we went. We did not exactly plan any of this, and got there during spring break. Irv’s friend was out of town. It was cold, dark gray and raining. We’re sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Athens when a redneck sitting at the counter asks us:
“Is that your car?”
The only long-haired bearded hippies in Athens? Doh!
I told him its story (NOT ours!). He said it would be a real conversation piece out at his farm.
“Would you sell it?”
Heck, it would give us more than enough of a stake to hitch to NYC so sure I would. We could even buy warm clothing!
I had only paid $50 for it. Bubba was ready to give me $500! The title was notarized over to me. I had not yet gotten it transferred. He wasn’t sure. He wanted to ask a friend for advice. Would we follow him over there? Sure we would. Turns out his friend was an Athens city cop! We were going to the police station. Incredible. Here we are carrying enough for life in a Georgia State penitentiary sitting in the police station!
We’re sitting with Bubba on a wooden bench in police headquarters while his friend checks stolen car reports (it was not). You could not have made up this scene if you were a writer ON one of our acid tabs. In the end, his friend could not say unequivocally to buy it, even though he saw no real problem with it, as it was registered to the guy on the title I had bought it from. Bubba just was uncomfortable enough with the situation that he apologized for our time and didn’t buy it.
By then it was quite late at night. We had driven straight through; we were cold, wet, hungry and tired. Irv and I pooled our limited resources and got a cheap motel. We tried to decide whether to wait for his friend to return to school and then sell him the acid and go on. We had just enough, maybe, for gas back to Miami. We were in no condition for rational thinking or decision making.
It was then that Irv asked if I thought the 27 hits were enough to kill him if he took them all at once. I told him I had never heard of anyone dying from overdosing on acid, just getting really fucked up. I did not think it would work. I was unfazed at the idea of him killing himself; I just did not think that would do it. So he didn’t. In the morning we headed back from our big adventure. I never saw him again but ran into Gil some years later and asked after Irv. No surprise, he said Irv had finally gotten around to killing himself. I was not interested in the details. I have not seen Gil since then either.