Leaving Australia Before the After: Escaping Los Angeles

When I first sought her love it was the '60s

Everyone had a go of her ' make love not war'

We all chanted it we all wanted her

I wanted her just to myself
 so did everyone else.

Like being at the service department in a market

Get in line - wait for your number
 I always take two numbers

it is a habit

from when I wanted her twice an hour
 NUMBER 41

' A kilo of Brie please'
 NUMBER 42

Breasts and thighs please

I never did get her all to myself
 She had a daughter

gained a lot of weight
 No one wanted her
 She committed  suicide

no one lined up
 for her funeral.

We were escaping Los Angeles in the spring of 1969. There were five or six of us leaving in the middle of the night. Someone in our house said that drug officers would raid the house before morning. We had our beautiful, though devoid of furniture, ten-bedroom mansion in Long Beach but now we were leaving in the middle of the night with whatever possessions we could grab. Long Beach was to be just another stop on the way through life – an unintended stop as so many stops are. To describe each step along the way all the way to Adelaide from Clifton Park and back to Clifton Park would be difficult. The difficult part, being remembering, coupled with the ‘who would care?’ if I did remember and described each step.

Friday, February 10, 2006, I had this conversation with my current wife, on the way home from work tonight, thirty-seven years later. Would I ever know what it would feel like to be settled, or is each moment really just a stop on the way? On the way to where? Just a little over a year ago we bought then renovated this large Victorian House in upstate New York. https://neuage.org/house/ We spent so much time and money fixing this place up – we were working until mid-night most nights, after a full day of work – just a year ago. We said that we should live here for at least five years. But here we are preparing to move to the city – as they call New York City. No place to live, no jobs, and my father will be 101-years old in a few months but still we are moving to the City, three-hours away. I do not know how to stop and stay in one place. I could not do it four-decades ago and I have not been able to do it since.

How do we get to where we are? I could start with when I was born – in 1947 delivered by a marine sergeant in a military hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan and I have never favoured anything war like but for some reason that was my start. Did the good sergeant know that 18 years later I would get out of going to Viet Nam? However, that was not my start. Things started long before then for my birth to be there. For some reason my mother, who was living in upstate New York went to Battle Creek just to give birth to me. Why Michigan no one seems to know. Since there is no father, seemingly in the picture, I cannot discover much more than what it says on my birth certificate. The steps from being born in Michigan and being adopted in upstate New York are not known. I found my blood grandmother at age forty-five and asked her what the story was, but she claims not to know who my father was. Her story is that mum hooked up with a passing sailor and then went off to give birth in Michigan. In 2003, I tried to get my grandmother to spill the beans because not only I, but also my sister, who I met for the first time at age 45 believes there is more to the story and that our grandmother does know the story. However, she would not say anything more than the oft-told story of the passing sailor.

Therefore, I have had to leave out some steps in my story because I do not have a clue what the step is. That I was adopted when my solar progressed Uranus, ruler of my fourth house was exactly on my natal Mars shows this event and with Jupiter transited my fourth house my life would obviously have the religious overtones that it did. I could go back further but that would be just metaphysical musings. All of this had something to do with me ending up in Australia. Alternatively, maybe not.
Did I choose to go to Australia before I incarnated?

I always found this a very strong reason because nothing that I experienced in Australia would have been of my choosing. Too much has happened to believe anything more than an absolute master plan was involved and I was dragged along with my body without little of my own planning unfolding.
Our Volkswagen Van that we were fleeing Los Angeles in had a birth too. Not the usual birth that most Volkswagen vans have, getting their parts screwed in along some automobile assembly line in Germany. Apart from the actual shell of the van, only a few parts were what were in it at its beginning. It was always going to be an escape van – maybe it was born with a strong Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury aspect. We had used the van to escape Northern California just a few months earlier.

Not all experiences that begin in one moment in California end a moment later. I still have my best friend, Randy. I met Randy at the end of 1968 (dropping LSD in my mouth and looking for spaceships with) and I saw him a few months ago (May 2003) at his daughter’s graduation in Syracuse, New York.

He flew over from Oregon and I drove there from Albany, New York. Randy got me into the Holy Order of MANS in 1969 in Honolulu. I got him out of the Order when he oversaw a centre in Nashville, Tennessee (1973). I was sharing a house in Honolulu with Randy when I received the phone call from Adelaide that someone I had met in Sydney, Australia in January of 1980 was pregnant. We were at a Ry Cooder concert enjoying ourselves on cocaine. When we arrived home, there was that phone call. That was May of 1980. As life would have it Randy and I both had children within a month of each other, not from the same person and not in the same state. My rendezvous was a strange interaction inflection due to an infection of an affection I had in Towson, Maryland with someone I absolutely loathed and fought with in Sydney only a few months earlier (and would fight with through the South Australian Family Court for the next twenty-years in Australia). Our son was born in Kahuku on the North Shore of Hawaii.

Randy’s conception was in Hawaii and the birth was in California but for a short period in the beginning of our children’s lives, we all lived together. I will come back to this close to the end of Part One.

For now, we were escaping Los Angeles. Richard, one of our original ‘Funny Farm’ residents had gone a bit bonkers whilst in LA. We were all injecting large amounts of methedrine, but it affected him more adversely than the rest of us. What happens with crystal meth, ‘speed’, is that one just races around in their life (and everyone else’s) for as long as the drug takes effect. It is like taking a large amount of diet pills; the mind goes into overdrive. I used to like to ‘do speed’ then write for days at a time. I have no record of what I wrote but I thought it was quite significant. One usually talks nonstop for hours along with some minor physical effects such as grinding teeth and clenching fists. I loved speed. I felt as if my mind was clear and at times that I was in touch with the mind of god but then I use to also think that whilst on LSD. Now that I have not had any sort of drugs, aside from coffee, for decades I can also say I definitely do not feel that I am in touch with the mind of god. Therefore, I would assume that religion is an opiate – oh shit, someone else already said that. We would take speed for several days and we would not sleep due to the worst part of doing speed – crashing. What would happen is that when the speed would wear off there would be a rapid descent into a murky and often depressing and paranoid state of confusion. I have been crashing now since August 2003 but not from drugs. The best way to avoid crashing too hard was to either swallow or inject ‘reds’ (barbiturates – a sedative) which we called downers. Over a period, one would begin to become mentally damaged.

There would be a bit of a psychotic delusional period of hallucinations but different from LSD hallucinations. LSD would usually produce colourful psychedelic visuals and sounds and feelings whereas ‘speed’ would produce negative and dark forebodings at the end of the trip.

Richard believed narcotic agents were watching us. He said that cameras surrounded our house and even bird nests in trees had cameras observing our house. We had to stop him from chopping down a large tree in the yard – he later threw rocks at one nest and when it appeared on the ground it was realized that there were no cameras in the nest and in fact there were a couple of small blue eggs. Instead of being appeased, Richard just informed us that the wrong nest had been knocked out of the tree, and in fact, there were cameras in some of the other nests. The day before we left for San Francisco, Richard dug many holes in our front yard believing he had buried a large quantity of ‘speed’ and he could not exactly remember where.

Richard did not go with us, when we drove off, he was still digging holes – in the middle of the night. No doubt he was the type of squirrel in a previous incarnation that would forget which hole he shoved his nuts in. But this was the 1960s and we were all a bit like that I suppose. Not knowing which hole we had put our nuts into.

Few people know us whilst we are alive and even less know us when we are dead. Only the closest person or maybe even a few people really remember our essence when we are dead and when they die then even the known essence of us disappears. We can read about a famous person who died a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago but who they really were, in thought and feeling no one knows. That is our fate, to be only known until the personal knower is dead then we are fully dead forever. I like reading stories about Kind Arthur, but I, as anyone else, do not really know King Arthur. Did he desire children did he cry when he did not have clean knickers to put on? Did he wear knickers? We are in the same boat – sailing off to Avalon that King Arthur was on, though no one will paint a picture of us doing it for future generations. We can never be anything more than a myth to someone in the future and only a handful of beings get the honour even to be a myth. Most of us are merely evolutionary fodder, just fertilizer for future consciousness that our sun will swallow one day when it explodes and shrinks down to a black hole as the universe eventually collapses upon itself in a final fart of destiny.

No doubt, I am the only one now in existence who remembers this Richard wanker. Perhaps that is all our fates, to be remembered by the last person to remember us as a wanker.

We did a large quantity of ‘speed’, got into the Volkswagen van that we had arrived in LA in and headed north. One of the people in the van said that they knew a place we could stay in San Francisco. There were four of us leaving together the American Indian girl who lived with us in Glen Ellen and had gone to LA with us. She later would become a famous Haight-Ashbury hippie (Wahoo), her boyfriend, a Viet Nam veteran, the owner of the van and me. It is about an eight-hour trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco though I have driven it faster.

One time with a car full of people, and me on LSD, we made the three hundred and ninety- four-mile trip in about five hours. It is still a very vivid memory, more than thirty-five years later. The speedometer would read 90 miles per hour but that did not seem to matter. It was as if I was on a magic carpet, and I would weave in and out of traffic (this was on a freeway not Highway One which is a two lane curvy road along the coast) changing lanes frequently. I doubt that I slowed at all between the two cities. How we survive these situations is a wonder to me. We even had a large quantity of narcotics that we were transporting. Why do some die so young, for example, taking one’s life soon after turning 20 with a seemingly great career ahead (book 2 ‘Leaving Australia’), and others, like I have most of my life, just have little regard for life and nothing happens?

When I first sought her love it was the '60s

Everyone had a go of her ' make love not war'

We all chanted it we all wanted her

I wanted her just to myself
 so did everyone else.

Like being at the service department in a market

Get in line - wait for your number
 I always take two numbers

it is a habit

from when I wanted her twice an hour
 NUMBER 41

' A kilo of Brie please'
 NUMBER 42

Breasts and thighs please

I never did get her all to myself
 She had a daughter

gained a lot of weight
 No one wanted her
 She committed  suicide

no one lined up
 for her funeral.

9-10-94 Victor Harbor, South Australia

The only people I can recall now – 34 years later  – that were in the apartment on Spruce Street, that April, when we arrived  still high on ‘speed’ were Carol Ann and her six-month-old baby, Desiree Eva.  Thirteen years later I would be with Australian wife number one and son number  one driving through San Francisco. We were lost and I was driving. We needed to  visit a tofu factory in Oakland, across the Bay. I stopped to look at a map and  I got out of the car to see what street we were on. Not only was I on Spruce  Street, but I was in front of the house where I met Carol Ann.
   
   I have had so many things in my life happen like  this that I almost did not pay it any significant metaphysical attention. I did  not say anything to
   Australian wife number One but my day became a melancholy shadow of a time  that I knew could never be re-enacted, but it could be and has been remotely  relived or at least remotely reviewed – which I did then and again now as I  write this.
   
   It had taken us the whole night to drive the 500  miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco and sleep was all that was on my  mind. But then there was Carol Ann. I am not sure about love at first sight but  when I saw her – she bewitched me or so I thought at the time. We took LSD  together soon after I arrived at her apartment, and we realized then that we  had spent many lifetimes together and that this was destiny. Of course, I  cannot imagine thinking that now or even remotely believing in such things as a  past life. One of my strange claim-to- fames was almost being run over by Janis  Joplin, ("The Queen of Psychedelic Soul"). I was walking home  up one of those San Francisco hills when she came racing up the road in her  psychedelically painted Porsche when I was crossing. One of those ‘I will  always remember’ experiences. I had been to several of her concerts including  one at the Fillmore then driving back to our Funny Farm in Glen Ellen in an  altered state with the rest of the people in the car.
   
   Went to a frog jumping contest in the country.
   Oh they jumped far  they jumped wide
   The farmer’s son had the fastest from  The fastest frog had the farmer's son
   and they were both so fast that no  one saw them leave no one saw them come
   I once had me a girl who shined like  the sun she sparkled like the stars
   I saw her come I  saw her leave
   The sun in the morning a star in the  evening both too far to grasp too high to reach
 just like country and her frogs and  the farmer and his children.

NEXT 20. Carol Ann

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