13 - Key West

Christmas 1965 Key West Florida
I had my first Christmas alone in Key West

Escape is normal. The story of the universe
is one of escape from the Big Bang to the ever- expanding cosmos is an escape from the Centre. What it is with escape is that we never know where the escape will end up whether it is getting out the door in the morning or an exploding star, the ultimate end is never known. All that escape initiative does is to set the process into motion and escape is nothing more than the desire to change. It is the most important part of evolution. Without escape there would be no movement, no change, no new sexual partners, and no new galaxies. From the moment of being conscious of being in a womb every cell of our being is involved with how to escape. The first escape is the escape from being within our mother. The final escape is the surrender of our escape into life and the return or the entrance into what there is when there is no longer this physical realm. If there is nothing at the end, then we escape to nothingness. In 1965 I had to escape Clifton Park, New York. It all began with my desire to be an athlete. I had the typical cravings of all youth. I was going to be an airline fighter pilot and fly super-fast planes and bomb the shit out of whoever the enemy was.

I got so angry
             my dream  exploded
             now they’ll  never come true. Will you? Bombs dropping continually
             exploding myths  of eternal life.
             Where the bombs  don’t land snipers
             the spring air.
             There will be  no new blossoming here In the shelters children plan the rest of their lives.
   ‘Two-minutes  from now I’ll eat. Four-
             minutes from  now
             I will kiss my  mother’s tears goodbye
             Six-minutes  from now I’ll open my arms to the American mortar fire in front of
             my mother’.
             When I was a  child I planned my life
             too.
             Basketball  champion, Baseball hero, Air-
             Force fighter  pilot.
             President of  the United States
             (bombing  villages and saving large breasted youthful capitalistic girls).
             But this was  never part of the plan.
             As I sit in my  chair watching the six o’clock news I’m a victim too.
             Here in  Sarajevo. Here in Rwanda. In Belfast. In the Townships. Los Angles. Victor  Harbor. Clifton Park, New York.
             The bombs burst  through the television
             set.
             I am hit.
             Memories of  childhood pour out of my
             wounds.
             Pain takes over  my consciousness.
             Somehow I  manage to crawl over where the TV is plugged in:
             Once the plug  is pulled my wounds heal. My world is safe.
             War
             Revolution  Terrorists Accidents They no longer exist.
             i am safe i am  safe.
             In my dead  mother’s womb.
             Middleton,  South Australia 1988

In the early 1960s I think the enemy was Russia. But I never got to be a jet pilot. Those dreams went up in smoke when I started to run away to Greenwich Village in New York City at about fourteen years of age. A little bit of pot here a few drinks there and next I knew it I was in the seventh grade at Shenendehowa Central School walking up and down the halls reciting poetry. Some poems I wrote and some I got out of a book on the ‘beat’ generation. One thing that I was good at though was sports. I had planned to be a basketball player.

Firstly, I would go to a top rank university, probably UCLA, and lead them to a few national titles then I would go on into the NBA and play for the New York Knicks. At the time, this was about 1961 when I was fourteen or fifteen, I was quite a good player, and I was tall. I was six feet two and I assumed still growing. I figured at the rate I was growing I would be about six feet ten – which was a good height for an NBA player. What I never counted on was that I would stop growing at fourteen. Later in life I would watch my sons stop growing at fourteen too. Leigh got to six feet four and Sacha to six-foot-two by the age of fourteen but then that was it. Not knowing who my father was I do not know if he too stopped growing at fourteen, but the pattern was set somewhere.

At the restaurant I worked at one of the waiters told me that she had gone to Miami with some fellow the weekend before. Innocent me told one of the cooks that this person had spent the weekend in Miami with some dude. How was I to know it was her husband that I was telling it to and who left soon after – even though he was in the midst of working – to go and find this person to kill him for fucking his wife for the weekend in Miami? Of course, I never said they were fucking in Miami but just that they had gone there for the weekend. Later that night the waitress told me I had better leave Key West because this fellow she had gone to Miami with was looking for me and he had a gun and was going to shoot me. I left work, went back to my room, took my couple of possessions and hitchhiked to Miami in the middle of the night all the time worried that some loser with a gun was going to shoot me. I just kept on going, past Miami, past Orlando, past Groveland. I had no specific place I was headed, just north. Sometime in the early morning I got a ride with a trucker headed west. I have no recollection of that trip accept getting in a truck and a day or two later as we approached New Orleans I decided to hop out. I believe I had originally thought of going to California, but I was 18 and the rest of the country as well as the rest of the world would be there for me to explore for the rest of my life.

Reading through a box of letters my mother wrote in 1965 to my brother Robert in New York when I was in Groveland Florida, every letter, and there are eleven in front of me; she goes on about me from they are going to kick me out of school because I will not get a haircut to how I am doing poorly in my subjects to I have no money. My brother wrote back to my mother a few times saying how important it was for me to complete school or go into the service. My advice to parents is to let your children go through their life. We try to raise our children, give them what we believe is helpful guidance, but it may not be helpful at all. It may not be their path. Often those who will change the world are the ones that do not fit in with the moment’s story. I know I was not able to do life the way others were doing it. All the way back to my report card in second grade saying I was confused I have not flowed easily with the world around me. Now 74 years old I am not fighting anymore, and I go along with life; not because I want to but it is just easier. I love what I went through in life. Life has been a grand adventure that I recall fondly. To have done what my family had wanted me to do and followed their path would have left me to be like so many Americans; wishing, in their old age, that they had lived a life. In quiet moments, laying away in the middle of the night for example, to remember a time that I had which I would not have had if I had stayed in Clifton Park, is a wonderful experience. I love to be able to say to myself; ‘wow, I did that’. And the older I become the grumpier I become. I doubt that I really do toe the line yet, but I plan on going along with life. Soon. Until then I will still be the odd one out. Laughing inside at those around me.
1966.

I stayed in New Orleans for the first few months of 1966.

My memories of that stay are few. I worked at Hotel La Salle at 1113 Canal Street. Hotel La Salle is located at the edge of the French Quarter adjacent to the Saenger Theatre with 42 rooms on 3 floors and currently rated 4 Stars out of 10, according to my squiz on the Internet. I started off as a busboy and eventually managed the front desk at nights; this was my third real job following working at a furniture store in Groveland or Lakeland Florida and my short lived short-order-cook (I just cooked the easy things like burgers and fries) in Key West. I remember going to a movie with a girl who was staying there, and she said it was her last night before going into the Army. We went to a pornographic cartoon9F (I thought it was Fritz the Cat but that did not get released until 1972, so it must have been something else) and I walked her back to her room, said goodnight, and went back to my front desk job. For years I realized how I really missed the cues of that one and I was so much into doing the right thing that I never thought of anything more because I was working at the hotel and I must have worried about a conflict of interest. I kicked myself a lot for years over that and said if I ever worked at a hotel again then I would entertain and satisfy opportunities as they presented themselves. When I was 18 there were still some of the overly moral Christian traits surging through my being. A few years later the hippy movement was alive, and, well… everything changed. I have no other recollections of that time except watching the Mardi Gras parades and drinking lots of beer, working as much as possible and I met my first girlfriend during that time.

(It is now 24/07/2025. I still have letters to my parents, sitting on my father’s desk, here in Adelaide from La Salle Hotel, New Orleans. The desk was in my Clifton Park home in the 1950s – in my father’s study. Since then, it has been in everyone of our homes since 2002: Round Lake, NY, Brooklyn, NY, Jersey City, Dalian, China and two homes here in Adelaide. I even have a lamp on the desk from when it was my father’s back in the 1950s and long before. We got the lamp re-wired for the electricity downunder. Of course, we still eat off the plates that I grew up with which means they are more than a hundred-years old as they were my father’s growing up plates too. Narda thinks I hang on to the past. What?)

I was 18, my first girlfriend, Rita, I think was about 15 or 16, and she was from Jackson Mississippi. We lived together for a few months then we discovered that her parents were looking for her, so she went back to Jackson.

History (her story as we are told to say in the world of gender equality – but this is my story, so I will stick with history) is an arbitrary item. The cliché that some event was relegated to the dustbin of history or was a historical footnote or it just was history can work on an individual level too. It should be a mandatory (sorry for all the words with man at the beginning but in English we are dealing with a very male dominated language) part of everyone’s life that they write their story. A rule of life on this planet should be that at various ages of multiples of seven or to line up with aspects of Saturn we should have to write about where we are in life at that time of our life. Depending on when a person is born Saturn lines up anywhere from within a few months to a year of multiples of seven.

At about seven years of age when Saturn makes its first separating square to itself1 (Saturn cycle is 28-years. The first square being around age seven, the opposition around age 14 a waxing square at 21 and a return at 28. We live and breathe according to Saturn cycles. My second cycle of Saturn is just starting, and I am a mere 58 as Saturn transits mid-Leo to bother my Saturn-Pluto conjunction then to sit (shit?) on my Sun…) we should write what we want to be when we grow up, what we think of the world, what we believe – stuff like that. I think most people have embarked on their life’s career at age seven in some form. I remember when my children were seven. Sacha was seven in 1988; his natal Saturn is at 9 Libra and sits exactly on top of my Neptune, giving us somewhat of a psychic tie.

Of course, we all have psychic times and ties at some level of some existence so that really is all a bit of a bullshit statement. But what isn’t bullshit when we pretend, we imagine that some possible absolute is true? Saturn was at nine Capricorn in the beginning of 1988 when Sacha was seven. We were living in Mt Compass on our farm and Sacha had just started discovering the wonders of what cans of spray paint could do to the urban landscape. Sacha began doing more art. I have several pieces of his art still with me, sixteen years later.

They were mostly of trains and to this day he has a fascination with trains and enjoys the idea of combining his love of aerosol art with trains. At the age of eight Sacha began making his ‘tag’ and becoming immersed in the hip hop movement at a time when most kids his age were interested in the pop music of the time. Sacha got his first bike when he was seven and it became his main means of transportation for the next ten years. Recently, at the age of 23 Sacha got his driving license.

Leigh was seven in 1990 (his natal Saturn is at 27 Libra 45 and sits exactly on top of my natal ascendant) and Saturn was at twenty-seven degrees Capricorn in 1991 when he was seven and began playing baseball – joining his first organized baseball club, Southern Districts tee-ball club at the time.

Leigh became obsessed with baseball beginning at this time and said that when he grew up he would play for the New York Yankees. The first time we went out to see if he could hit a baseball we were living in Middletown. I threw the ball one hundred times and he hit it about four times. He was so upset and frustrated that we began doing this every day along with throwing the ball and for many years later Leigh threw one hundred pitches a day and batted as much. Ten years later he would sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Leigh also got his first bike at age seven and he spent a week trying to ride it and eventually gave up. I think it was the only thing he gave up on so easily. He never got into riding a bike and preferred to walk until he got his first car age sixteen. Leigh’s twenty-first is in July 2004 and I will go to Sydney in August 2004 for the same reason I was there in August 2003. I predict more people will know about Leigh’s baseball career in 2005 when his Saturn makes its returning square (I am writing this Saturday, January 31, 2004, Round Lake, New York). I was seven in 1954 (my natal Saturn is at 13 Leo) and Saturn was at thirteen degrees Scorpio in November 1954 when I was seven and I do not have a clue what I thought then. However, I do know that at a Billy Graham event at Madison Square Garden, when I was seven, I got saved. I do remember that event as one of my early triumphs. My parents bought me a bicycle that I had wanted for a long time the next day. It was at the age of seven that I

first linked Christianity with material possessions. I was a full-on Christian want-to-be or perhaps I was at the time. In elementary school at Shenendehowa Central School in about grade one I carried my Bible to school and prayed before I ate my lunch. Being in Madison Square Garden with Billy telling us how we would live in Heaven when we died, that at any moment the Lord could decide to take us (kill us?). If we were not saved, we would burn for eternity in Hell and that all we had to do was go up front and with Billy’s special intercession with God we would be saved and not be condemned forever. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of people going forward to get saved and someone turned around and asked me if I would not want to go up front and ‘be saved’. It was my first time in Madison Square Garden and coming from a small country town this was all so exciting. I could not do anything but get swept up in the moment.

I remember at about age seven I would tell people that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer. I was going to write novels and the reason I have not been able to fulfil that plan is that I have never been able to stay in one place long ago or have the time because of so much else going on. Now, at age 56 I am rapidly headed toward my second Saturn return (2006) or eighth seventh year cycle when I will either find what the hell it is I am doing on this planet, and I will let the world know it whether it wants to or not. (hey, it is ten-years later, 2016, and I am still working on this stupid book; now called an e-book, and like everyone else, I do not have a clue what I am doing on this planet other than passing some DNA around which fewer and fewer want which I supposed is good).
A side note as I read this over in July 2015 a couple of weeks before turning 68, I must say I did not find out what I am doing on this planet with my Saturn return and today with transit Saturn sitting on my natal Moon and me still not believing in Astrology, though I do know where Saturn is today, is that I do not have a clue about anything.

Rita was somewhat a part of my history for a couple of decades, though more of a footnote to my history, as she had no direct effect on my life like some people have. I kept contact with Rita for a decade or two somehow. I moved so much but I had her address in Jackson and I visited her once sometime in about 1967 and we were together for a while in 1973 when I was a street artist in New Orleans. During our ‘get together’ in 1974, I told her about a religious order that I had joined in 1969. I was out of the Order at the time but I was still gathering people for them. I went back into the Order in April 1974, primarily to get away from my girlfriend of the day, Chialeah.

Rita joined the Holy Order of MANS (see https://neuage.org/LeavingAustraliaBeforeTheAfter/HOOM.html) soon after. I never saw her again, but I know she gradually went off, whatever ‘the track’ was. She had a baby in the 1970s and had some medical problems though I forget what they were. She wanted to be a priest in the Order I had been in so another former girlfriend, T... (I need to leave out her name as she came across a rough draft of this a few years ago with her first and surname in it and she spit the dummy – gosh some people are so sensitive), from my 1973-1974 New Orleans days ordained her over the telephone one day sometime in the early-1980s. In 1992 when I visited my friend T... in Indiana she told me that Rita had a very troubled life and that I should call her sometime because she had no friends, was ill, and heavily in debt. I did not know what I could say to cheer her up and I have not thought about her since my children and I were visiting T... in Indiana in early 1992 until today whilst writing this. Like so many people who pass in and out of our lives I wonder if she is still alive, did she ever get to where she wanted to go in life, does she go to sleep dreaming of me? Think about this for a moment: somewhere there may be someone who masturbates thinking about you – now that is an off-putting thought.

I was getting bored with New Orleans so in about May or June of 1966 I hitched hiked to New York. I often try to remember who I was in certain times and places and try to go back and visualize me then, but it is impossible. Every moment of our lives is so transitory just like the people who pass through. Sometimes when I am in a public place, I will look at someone and wonder if someday I will be involved with that person. Will we become lovers five years from now or maybe save each other’s lives in a disaster and we are just crossing paths now waiting for the real interaction that will come. I look at people in crowed elevators and trains or on the street and wonder if anyone of those people were part of my life in another lifetime. Maybe we were siblings or partners or enemies – killing one or the other on the battlefield. What we see is so little of what really exists that I cannot help but think that we are so asleep and that we are just like bumper cars in an amusement park bouncing into one another and every occasionally, hoping in the same car for a while for experience. We are so self-centred thinking that the people who enter our lives are entering our lives and not us theirs. Maybe I was still with these thoughts when I left New Orleans in 1966 and headed back north. My brother Robert lived in New York City, so I went to see him.

I had lived in Greenwich Village before; a few run-away times when I was 15/16/17 years old for a few weeks at a time. It seems that from letters I found this week (22/07/2015) in my shed here in Australia that have been dragged from country to country for the past decades that there was a lively discussion about me between my brother, Robert, and my mum back in 1965 – 1967. Here is an example from one of Robert’s letters about my situation:

“I got a letter from Terry yesterday. He seems to be well. He mentioned doctors’ bills etc. Had a good time during Mardi Gras. He mentioned he might or that he planned to start north April 1. It looks like he isn’t having much luck with school. He is not doing much with that end of things. Of course, he can’t really do much himself. He should get back home, get into school, finish then travel – or get into the service; trying with our local board at Saratoga – Phila Street; the place where dad took me. He should do something about something soon, or his chances of getting into school are going to be narrowed considerably…”

Gosh darn. OK so I stuffed about and twenty-five years later went to school for like the next 17 years. This right here shows that it is not good to be judgmental of people’s life style. Now I am Dr. Neuage. I have more than a dozen letters where my mum and Robert rabbit on about my lot in life. Fortunately, Robert loosened up a few years later and became the cool brother I always wanted. Then he died. From AIDS. And I never once commented on his lifestyle.

OK one more section of a letter – the theme is the same; my life is fucked:

“Yesterday shortly after, Terry called dad at 6 or so he called me about 6:20 of course, I had completely forgotten that he would be here in the city so soon. Time sees to fly and I had not given it too much thought. Well, since I have to work Saturday now, I decided to get up; meet him at Port Authority and have breakfast with him and leave him later for work. Well, at 7:00 I met him, talked + had breakfast with him, got my haircut, while he looked on. He showed me his beautiful pictures from Mardi Gras. Well, I left him, and went to work. He was going to try to contact friends of his. He needed shoes; brought a little of his things with him. They are at Port Authority in a locker, He left his pots + pans etc. in N. O. He has some money, some of which is in Traveller’s checks. I told him to keep in contact with me. He called today; said he had stayed in a hotel yesterday afternoon and last night. He was dead tired. He was beginning to get frantic since he does not have a place to stay (really). He lost his address book, so he cannot keep track of his friend’s numbers + addresses.”
More of the same about my feral lifestyle:

“… he needs shoes since all he has now is a pair of beaten-up sandals. Of course, he realizes he

needs to get cleaned up. He talked with me quite rationally, which I was very pleased about. He is set upon getting a job somewhere and finding a place to live. I told him to look at the situation realistically.

He is bound to run out of money if he doesn’t get something where he can afford food, clothing, and a place over his head. I will keep in contact with him as long as he keeps calling me. I have no telling where he will be the next time I hear from him. This afternoon he was going to go to the park in an attempt to relocate old acquaintances who might be of some assistance to him. I am happy that he had made an effort to keep me informed and does call me for advice if he needs it. I didn’t know what more to say in that respect until I hear exactly what is up next. He had hitched hiked part of the way and had finally had taken a bus from Philadelphia to here in N. Y…”

And on it went; lots of letters about what a loser I was. Well actually my life would get worse, and Robert would bail me out over and over
whether it was getting me out of a psych ward, getting me back on my feet after prison, being supported of a cult I got mixed up with, and being there when I was alone as a single parent with two children in a foreign country. There were a couple of times over the years that my life was on track.
Robert would never know about my schooling. I started university in 1991 age 44 and graduated with a B.A. in 1995, and Masters in 1998 a PhD in 2005 and a teacher’s degree in 2011. Robert died in 1994. I also had a son signed by the L. A. Dodgers in 2000. I was a professor at four universities between New York and Australia, I was a middle school teacher at a public school and at a private school in NYC and the Director of Technology at an international school in China and at a top private school in Albany, New York. Quite a contrast from how my life was when there were concerns that I was not going to get anywhere in life unless I went back to school in the 1960s.

The songs of the mid-1960s were embedded into my consciousness. I was a product of that time and space continuum with protesting everything that went before and that was happening at the time.
Today fifty years later whilst cleaning house in Adelaide, South Australia I am listening to Bob Dylan radio on my television on iTunes. What has changed? I wish I could walk out the door and be on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village on my way to Washington Square. I did live that life for several years not long ago from 2006 – 2011 when we lived in Brooklyn then Jersey City, but we went to China for three years and now back in South Australia for the past year and probably for the rest of my life I can only turn the volume on full and in my mind be back to when life was easy to live in the moment.

When life was discoverable, simple, exciting, fun, experimental. When it was easy to live in the moment. How is it that fifty years of experience can so change us that we can no longer live in the moment? Now that I will be 68 in a few weeks and probably at the end of my life with all that is wrong with me I look back and realise it was good. I have had a good life. Stuff whatever is wrong now, whatever crisis there is, the tragedy that has been my life. I can take a deep breath and say look at what I have done. Not what I have accomplished or wish I had accomplished but what I have seen, what I have experienced, what I have thought. I do not know if I will have any greater experiences in life, no one knows from moment to moment what the next moment will bring. We can have an accident, stroke, heart attack, be in a terrorist attack, win the lottery or have a significant breakthrough in our thinking.

Over the past few years, I have seen my mentors from the 1960s; Bob Dylan in concert in Adelaide, Leonard Cohen singing his mind-altering songs including Hallelujah in Madison Square Garden in 2011. I have no idea what songs of today are. It has been decades since I have listened to current pop on the radio. I do not know who today’s singers are, I have little to do with this generation. What has changed is my looks a bit and that is it. My thinking pretty much is the same.

I've looked at life from  both sides now From win and lose and still somehow
             It's life's illusions I  recall
             I really don't know life at  all
             Joni Mitchell © 1967 Gandalf Publishing Co.

I think I related to the old Negro spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child". It dates to the era of slavery in the United States when it was common practice to sell children of slaves away from their parents. An early performance of the song dates back to the 1870s. I was a slave in my own white way to my parent’s thinking and they had taken me from my birth family though not in a deliberate way, but they programmed me in their

false belief systems, and I still get confused.
Greenwich Village in the 1960s was so full of hope. I was a street person which meant sometimes I slept on
a park bench in Washington Square Park and sometimes on my brother’s sofa or in a Salvation Army Hostel or if I had a quarter I would get on the subway and ride out to the end somewhere on Long Island and then take it back to the Bronx and I would lay down and sleep on the seat – cross the platform at the end and ride for another few hours.
We would sit in Thompson Square Park in the Alphabet City portion of East Village which was hipper at the time than Washington Square Park.
The Lower East Side was the hard-core hippie/beatnik area. Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, and so many folk singers would be on stage in Thompson Square Park on any given day. I played basketball there, I tripped there, I loved there, and I spent portions of my life in space there. I would get free food from the chanting Krishna folks. The Park is where Indian Sadhu A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada came to sing and preach in 1966, beginning the worldwide Hare Krishna movement. I managed to stay out of that mind-altering loop, but I did like their vegetarian food, and I loved their colourful images. The chanting drove me nuts and I would avoid that part though the bells they were ringing, and the incense were good. I had times of living only a block away from the park and that was where I would spend my day. It is still there. Narda worked with a teacher at St Luke’s School when we lived there in 2006 – 2011 whose grandfather was who the park was named after. I would go there today if it was not on the other side of the world but instead, I will listen to Bob Dylan Radio and clean the house.

Again, another part of my history that I do not recall too many details of was when or how or where I met, Anita or when I moved in with her.
What it was about her is that she had a large effect on my life, and it was because of the side events rather than the actual event that it became significant.

It seems so often that what I thought was the main event was just the setting up of what was to come next. The reason I am doing what I am doing now is to get myself in position for what will come next. I feel so blind and the future hides so
completely that I no longer even attempt to imagine why I am doing what I am doing and whether what I am doing is nothing more than a camouflage for the way it will be.

I only remember that she was from Philadelphia, and I went home with her once. Her family lived in a huge house, and she had a fireplace in her bedroom. I don’t recall much about her, but I think we didn’t get along that summer of 1966 at some point. For whatever reason of the day, I became quite attached to her even though I can barely think what she looked like except that she was shorter than me by about half a foot and she had curly hair. What she acted like, or anything escapes me. She announced one day she was going home to Philadelphia for a few days.

We could have passed one another at an airport or train station or in the streets sometime in the past forty years since we were lovers and looked at one another and had no idea who the other person was. It seems strange that someone we see in an elevator or a shop somewhere in the world may have been one we had decided to spend the rest of our life with or at least a good solid weekend; decades earlier or even in another lifetime. That person may have been a parent or sibling or the one who shot us dead in a battle for someone or the other’s freedom. We do not have any recollection – the importance of the moment seems so insignificant when we think it is so important now and we have no memory of it at another time.

We had been in a disagreement or fight or something about god knows what. Anita took sleeping pills and was under a psychiatrist care.

Now as I write this, I remember why we were having a fight.

I highly admired my brother and put him on a pedestal even though whilst growing up we fought all the time, and I would do terrible things to him like slash his paintings and report him for things I had done to get him into trouble. Robert and I were both adopted. He was adopted four years before me and was four years older.

There was something about him I did not know for a long time.

Whilst growing up he always favoured my mother over our father. Robert did his art, painting large canvases – most paintings were of flowers. He was quite a musician too being a very accomplished piano player and at times played the accordion and a tuba. I was not good at art and not at all musical and for all my years at playing the piano, I could never get past being able to play out of the Methodist Hymnal that my teacher used to teach me my lessons from. I used to beat Robert up a lot and tell him that he acted like a girl.

I was at a party with Anita, her brother’s party, and after the party I mentioned to her that her brother was gay. It was not a big thing to me, I just said it in passing and she said, ‘so is yours’. Well that really distressed me. I told her how wrong she was, and that was what we were having a fight about. Gay brothers (The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision) or alleged gay brothers; always gay brothers, socially gay, closet gays… the whole concept was so gay that I could not fathom it. (Epitaph of Leonard P. Matlovich, 1988, “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” Matlovich’s court case was made into a TV-Movie "Sergeant Matlovich vs. the US Air Force" and was telecast on August 21, 1978). I wanted my brother to be a great musician, artist, and like me, a lover of women in every way one could be.

Anita went out the door to go home to Philadelphia and soon after she left, I realized how alone I felt. I found her bottle of sleeping pills and took them all – a full bottle not opened yet. I did not want to die I just wanted to go to sleep until she returned a few days later. Later she would tell me that she had been at the train station ready to board when she changed her mind and returned to her apartment. She had tried to raise me but not only was I unconscious, but there was an empty bottle of pills nearby. For whatever reason Anita had returned to our apartment and she had called for an ambulance. I recall waking for a moment in the back
of the ambulance, hearing the siren. All that I remember from my time in the hospital was waking for a moment as they stuck a tube down through my nose to pump out my stomach. I heard one of the doctors say, ‘let’s give him a haircut’. It does seem strange how some things are remembered, and others are not. I had not had a haircut since my track meet some fifteen months earlier and I would not get another haircut until spring 1967 in a Mobile, Alabama jail.

Anita returned for some odd reason – such has been the pattern of my life. There are always those who survive and those who don’t. I have thus far survived whatever that may mean – god knows I have tried, or I have done things that should have once and for all put an end to such a confused life. Why is it some die so easily and willingly, and others make so much effort to end it ‘all’ before this illusionary existence disappears in smoke and ruin and fail? Maybe there is not an ‘all’, maybe we can only end a portion of all, maybe the part we think is but a portion is really it all (Nearly nine out of 10 people in the United States say they believe in heaven, according to a recent ABC News poll. Dec. 20, 2005, see,

http://abcnews.go.com/International/Beliefs/story?id=1374010) Maybe maybe.

When I became conscious, I was told I was dead at some point but I do not remember feeling concerned about it at the time. I did not go through some stupid tunnel and see Jesus smoking a joint or anything else. I never have. I have been what some say is in the near-death venue several times and let me tell you mate there ain’t no such thing. Those who believe they have gone through a tunnel and seen a light or whatever are making it up. Wishful thinking. Something that someone put into their head in hopes of their own gain. ‘Hey, look at me I saw Jesus’. Nonsense! What became a concern was that I was placed in the psychiatric unit of Bellevue Hospital as a suicide attempt. No matter how much I explained to a doctor who spent far too long interviewing me that I just wanted to go to sleep
until my girlfriend returned, I was not believed. I spent a couple of weeks in Bellevue before my brother signed me out, saying he would take responsibility for me, though I do not recall that he did. I went back with Anita for a while, but that relationship did not endure.

It was 1966, I was 18, and many people my age were going off to Viet Nam. I do not remember now what happened the rest of the summer of 1966 until the day came that I received my draft notice. I think Anita and I broke up – there was the time that I lived on the rooftop of her building. Whether that was before or after I innocently consumed every sleeping pill she had I am not sure. I had dragged a mattress up there. I would eat at one of the many soup kitchens that people of various charitable convictions would set up to show god cared for us lost and downtrodden souls. Toward the end of the summer, Anita and I were back together again, and I was living in her apartment. Then that was that relationship. Come and gone. Short sharp and shiny. But it affected the rest of my life, as I did not get to go to Viet Nam until forty years later.

I could not get my interaction with females to move along smoothly for decades. No doubt as an adopted human I seemed to be attracted to women who would leave. I eventually established a pattern of relationships earmarked by disappearing females, to emulate the behaviour of my mother. It would not be until I physically met my blood sister, in 1992, when I was forty-five years old, that I would switch to productive, longer lasting relationships.

On the day I was to be drafted I fronted up to the draft centre at 39 Whitehall Street (This would become the epi-centre for draft evaders over the next few years. “The police arrested 264 persons, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and the poet Allen Ginsberg, during a demonstration yesterday between 5 A.M. and 6 A.M. by more than 2,500 ant-draft, antiwar protesters at the armed forces induction centre at 39 Whitehall Street”. From the Internet, 1/23/2006 8:38 PM, http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/08/specials
/ginsberg-arrested.html).

All that stood between Viet Nam and me was a few hours of questions and a physical. I told
someone at the first desk that I had been in Bellevue Hospital for a suicide attempt. Soon I was speaking with someone who told me I would not be going to boot camp with the other fellows. At the time, I really did not care. I did not have a place to live. I did not want to go back to my parents. I did not want to finish high school. I was not political though I did not think the Viet Nam war made any sense.
However, I entertained the thought of joining the army, believing some structure would be preferable to my current directionless life.

Events? What control do we have when the unplanned becomes the planned? I never planned an overdose of sleeping pills to get out of going to Viet Nam but the years following, I spent protesting the war and I ‘did’ the 60s. If I had gone to Viet Nam in 1966, my life would have turned out so differently. If I had worn a jockstrap to my track meet at Shenendehowa, my life would have been so different just as everyday every event changes what happens in the distant future. When I took Anita’s sleeping pills I did not even know about the Viet Nam draft. My father sent me the forms a couple of months after I got out of the hospital. I had not really had much thought about going into the Army. I did consider it at one time because my life seemed so difficult and without direction.

Today, 09 March 2015 I was looking through boxes that I have had in storage for the past 14 years in Australia. One of the boxes contained letters from the 1960s. There is no date on this or an envelope, but it would have to have been in 1966 because it is about Anita. A letter to my parents.
Why someone would write a rambling somewhat ineligible letter to their parents – and I see I did that often; is a wonder to me. Did I think they cared about my thoughts and life? I had deeply disappointed them in the past between leaving school and home and sort of going through, rapidly, any money they would send me. It would take me decades and children of my own before I would realise that parent’s love is unconditional.
A letter to my parents in 1967, age 20.

“Folks:
Just a few pages to say what’s here etc.

Today just did another first. I gave a pint of blood for five dollars. I’m working on and off but sort of doing nothing – like a thinking period.
Anyhow I haven’t had a cent in over a week till today. I’ve realized money is little and I’m not worrying over a lot of money. Sort of existing, writing, thinking.

I stayed up all last night reading E.E. Cummings then went for my blood. I’m tired, bought groceries, am doin’ my clothes in the bathtub and I’m very happy – it’s sort of like I found myself. Anita and I don’t see each other much. For seven months we were always together. I was always depressed, ‘bout work, future, an’ most of all money. And I just dragged her too far down. We talked all one-night last Tuesday, and I realize a lot. Now I feel free, happy and I see so much that is so good and beautiful instead of seeing everything bad.

I’ve written over 100 poems in the past month. Anita wanted to publish some (she works for Dell Publishing Company). Some day you must read them. A friend of mine in New Orleans who has three of my poems that rhyme is putting them to music.”

(Fifty years ago, I was telling my father and everyone I met that I would be a famous writer. I suppose a lot of people when they are 19 – 20 years old believe they are special and it is only a matter of time before they get discovered. In fifty years, I never got my poems published or my stories (except for one children story that Scholastic Magazine published in 1990) or my photos or anything. In fifty years I have managed to get a few Facebook friends who will like something I have posted and that is it. Whoopee.)

“I found it as an escape from loneliness and so much of it is depressing ‘cept now I see so much good I’ve changed it. Here’s one sort of telling my feeling a week ago.

“Twelve O’Clock” Outside they say
It is twelve o’clock
They say it’s another day A new month
They say spring is near They laugh
Jingle money Talk of tomorrow Something new
Everyone comes to see.
Today I see
Only another day No time except
For voices saying twelve Out on the street.
My calendar says November I feel no spring
Smiles and laughs Are nothing
They are always around I wonder
I question
What and why is time Why calendars
Every day is the same My love said by
My love said see you soon I don’t count days
I have no watch I only know
I’ve been waiting To long
And I close the window As a voice says
Twelve o’clock.
------ no date given--- but about 1965

….. I hope you understand me. I’m very individual and have nothing to do with the hippie (beatniks) and their stupid scenes….“

I often wonder what my parents thought of me? Maybe there was a time when I was not into drugs, when I really believed I was just another famous writer perfecting my craft. I never thought at
the time that a tenth grade drop out with few friends or knowledge of how to publish if I had wanted could be anything but super successful. Fifty-years later I wonder if I was mentally ill then for being so grandiose or mentally ill now for never having found a way to be successful. In anything.

NEXT 14. Christmas 1966

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Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 78.