Christmas 1966 New York City

I spent Christmas of 1966 in New York City and have absolutely no recollection of it. I only know I was there then because I have it written down somewhere that that is where I was at that time. One of those diaries people keep – nothing written in it for months except on Christmas Day there is an instalment that says, “spent Christmas in New York City”.

During the end of 1966 and most of the first half or so of 1967 I lived somewhere on the Lower East Side in a series of apartments. Sometimes I lived alone. Sometimes, I stayed/lived with a group of people, sometimes, I lived with a girl; there was just the two of us living our lives; for a day, for a week. I recall living with a girl from Jamaica for a month or so. I sort of remember a bit about her. I think I may have been in love, or infatuated or had a crush, or was it puppy love? One day, and I remember this, she said she had to go back to Jamaica, or some such place and I never heard from her again. Another passing shadow. An intimate moment can be eternity. They are like shadows in my thoughts. Doors that open occasionally and I can see someone in there. Then I see me with somebody, and we are doing things; smoking dope, kissing, sex, cooking dinner, then the door closes, and another door opens. I know it is me, I know I was in those different rooms, but I do not have enough information available to know when or where or with whom I was with. Maybe a lady I saw recently when I was on a subway in New York City was a lover in a candle lit room forty years ago. How would I know? I had several homes.

(2021 – Adelaide) Three mornings a week my wife and I go to our Aqua Zumba or Aqua Fitness class. 45 minutes in the pool. I am the only male – 35 women (due to covid restrictions that is the limit – plus how could I service more?) all of us in our bathing suits. Oh! And the women are my age, some older, a few younger – I am 74, Narda is 67.
Most of the women are not of the slim bathing suit modelling group. We are all old, wrinkled – basically stuffed – however, there was a time 45 – 50 years earlier where we all thought we were rather hot and no doubt were. I look around. All my dreams come true – me with 35 girls in bathing suits leaping and gallivanting about – the ultimate wet tee-shirt fantasy
– boobs on the water – music from the 1960s – all the old hits except for the annoying background disco-Zumba sounds. But wait all this is with my glasses off – I put them on. Oh look, 35 women in their 70s overweight – but smiling and happy; what a great life I live.

I recall living alone for a while in the winter of 1966 – 1967. I usually worked for a temporary employment placement company and unloaded trucks or cargo from ships and sometimes I worked in restaurants washing dishes or doing short order cooking. None of my jobs lasted long though I do not remember why. The one job that I do remember that lasted for more than a few days and was a fulltime job was for a small coffee distribution company in the Village. I recently conducted a Google Internet search, but I could not find Charm Coffee listed in New York or a coffee wholesaler on Ninth Street, where I sort of remember it being located. I would ring restaurants and coffeehouses and say, ‘Good morning, Charm Coffee would you like to place an order for this week?’ It was the easiest of jobs, taking orders and going in the back and filling them for someone to deliver. However, the job came to an inglorious end one day when I took LSD in the morning and went to work and I constantly got the giggles every time I rang anyone and said, ‘Good morning, Charm Coffee…’ I know I had a girlfriend then because she was really upset with me for losing my job then soon I was living with16F someone else. What became of these women? They probably got married, had children, got divorced, and looked back at their free-loving days in the 1960s wondering how their life became so boring and middle-aged.

I did not have a steady girlfriend, and I did not know anyone that did (parents do not count in these equations). The 1960s and being a teenager in New York City did not lend itself to be in any type of serious relationship. By now I had been in two relationships that had lasted more than a couple of days and nights. I had been with Rita in New Orleans for a few months and I had lived with Anita for a sub-section of a passing-almost-forgotten summer. Those two relationships seemed serious at the time as I got to know these two females more than just knowing their first name. By nineteen my own children had both been in long-term relationships. Leigh was with Veronica for three years and Sacha with Monica for more than a year. Both boys had had several semi-serious relationships before then. I got married for the first time when I was thirty-three and before then I had not been in very many longer than a few days or weeks relationships. It was never that I was against long term relationships, but I did not meet too many people that I wanted to spend the ‘rest of my life’ with. Of course, that is a Terrell-Centric view; in reality no one wanted to be with me. Actually, I was fifty-five when I thought ‘OK I will hang out with this same person for the rest of the time I am on this planet’. Love? I was in love a lot and I think that is what deterred me from a longer than a few days’ commitments because it was so easy to fall in love. Now the notion of ever having any more relationships makes me tired and bored just thinking about it.

LSD-25, d-lysergic acid diethylamide, was a large part of my life. I do not recall when I first ‘dropped’ acid but by the time I was nineteen and living in NYC I had taken hundreds of ‘trips’. I have no idea where it all came from. LSD seemed to be everywhere I went, and it was always free. I have not taken it for more than 30 years and that was after an interlude of not doing it for many years before then. Randy sent me some LSD on sticky labels – ‘blotter acid’ on lips when I was going through my divorce in 1985 and I spent some happy times tripping away.

I had taken LSD when Sacha was quite young, about two-years-old, and the mother was at work (1983). She had many shelves of books in her living room, and I decided that the shelves needed cleaning. I thought I would take all the books down and clean then put them back. I piled them in order of size and colour in the middle of the floor. After I started ‘tripping’ I got quite confused, Sacha was piling books off the shelf too, and next I knew we were making a fort out of them. When the wife-of- the-day came home from work some six or seven hours later she was very upset, but I did not tell her I was ‘tripping’. Instead, I came up with some story of how Sacha had pulled the books down when I was in the toilet and that seemed to work. The only problem after that was that she wanted to go out and get some paint, to paint Sacha’s room. For some reason I drove. Every time I got to a traffic light, I would hallucinate on the lights but after a while we got to the paint store. I agreed on every colour she chose because all I could see were the colours running together and sometimes off the page and onto the floor. She never realized that I was stoned but that was the nature of our relationship – we had no idea where the other one was at in their mind at any given time. I had some wonderful days ‘tripping’ as a single parent in Mt Compass, playing for hours with the children, but no one ever knew. I told Sacha a couple of years ago and he said he always wondered why he had so many childhood memories of me spending hours at a time painting with them or setting up train tracks all over the house and once I told him about my taking LSD, he said his whole childhood made sense.

LSD was still legal in New York in 1966 (it became illegal in California in October 1966 and nationally in 1967). It was sold in record and clothing shops. There was never any thought that there would be anything wrong with it as all it did was make the participator hallucinate and a bit psychotic. During the 1950s, the U.S. government conducted experiments on unwitting participants in an operation code-named Project MK-Ultra but when many young people started to use and enjoy it the government no longer was interested. I often took
LSD in the morning when I first woke up and ‘tripped’ through the day. My favourite activity was riding the Staten Island Ferry and the New York City subway. On the subway I would ride in the first car and watch the train go through tunnels. I could see the stations ahead with the train stopping and people getting on. It was like I was the train with everyone getting inside of me. I also would take long walks at night on LSD sometimes around the Times Square area and other times I would walk along Wall Street thinking about the influence of this one street on the world. I never saw the dangers in taking LSD though I would not want my children to take it just because I would be worried they would do something crazy whilst ‘tripping’ and get hurt or they might get some substance that was not real LSD but had poisons in it. I may have taken LSD a thousand times and I have never had the ‘flash backs’ that others who have taken it have had. According to ‘the literature’ flashbacks are supposed to be the recurrence of the confusion and somewhat psychotic times one experienced whilst on LSD. I used to think that flashbacks would be good, as it would save me from taking more LSD. I could just have flashbacks, but it has never happened and the primary reason I gave up LSD and all other drugs is because I became bored with them and got to the point where I thought being ‘straight’ was more interesting than being high. I have even stopped drinking alcohol as that became boring too. Still drink a bit of coffee, though I gave that up for three years back in the 1980s, but I got bored with having given it up. I am so fickle that I do not even know what I will find boring next. I could get bored with writing my bit of a story here and trash this at any moment. What if get bored with getting bored? What happens then?

1967

Nineteen sixty-seven would be my most adventurous year so far. Sometime in early 1967, I returned to New Orleans for another Mardi Gras, which was on February 7 that year, 140 years after the first ever Mardi Gras (this is the point of life – facts mean so little without context and the fact of
140 may mean something to someone and nothing to the rest of us only matters, like anything does, to anyone who would give it credibility).
I hitched hiked to New Orleans. Rarely did I have more money than was enough to get something to eat and therefore I was not concerned with the creation of wealth so getting around in any other fashion at the time was impossible. In 1967, I was still 19 (until August 10) and I had no game plan for my life. I wanted to be a writer and began doing picture-poems at some point early in the year.
Picture-poems would outlast any other venture that I attempted to be successful at and I did my picture- poems for at least thirty-five years with only a few breaks in-between. Even now, at the age of 56 at the beginning of 2004 I hold on to hopes of one day being able to make a living off doing art shows with my picture-poems selling for a shit load of money each. I suppose it was the Jupiter transit of my Mercury in the ninth house conjunct Mid Haven that would have gotten me started in such a pursuit.
Jupiter was again at this position 23-years later when I began my fourteen-years of university. Jupiter takes about twelve years to go through the signs. Lately I have been re-working my original picture poems into Photoshop manipulated images for my e-book: ‘Picture Poems 1966 - 2015’ which gets published at the end of 2015 or sometime in 2016 or after I am dead or most likely three days after the end of eternity. I have 12 books in the Amazon catalogue as of 2021.

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