15 - Stowaway‌

When I lived in New Orleans the year before I was fascinated with how easy it would be to go overseas for free on a freighter. When I was young(er) my family would drive to New York City to see a family that my father liked go off on a freighter every five years to Cambodia17F (Yesterday we were on a boat going through a floating village in Chong Khneas on the Tonle Sap Lake not far from Siem Reap, Cambodia (10-Jul-07) and we saw two floating Catholic churches but none of the Doty’s legacy - the Missionary Alliance mob – a real black stocking group of bound-for-hell lyricists. Of course, that was all before Poi Pot made hell on earth for those who loved the Lord). We grew up with knowing about how the Dotys were off doing God’s work amongst the pagan heathen Buddhists of Asia. (In July 2006 I would spend ten-days as a tourist in Viet Nam. I could not associate the images that I grew up with of all these people bound for hell because they were not Christians with the happy smiling people that I came across. I stayed at a four- star resort and that may have been different than where the Dotys stayed in the 1950s – 1960s. I have been to Viet Nam several times in the last few years (now it is March 2015) sometimes visiting Narda’s son who has lived in Hanoi since 2011.). We called Mr. Doty, Uncle Joe, even though he was not related to us but was in fact a friend of my father’s. My father put him on a pedestal because he was the head of a missionary family for some Protestant group. Every five years the Dotys would come home and collect money off anyone and everyone and go back and do some more of God’s work. They would go back on a freighter because that was the cheapest way to get to Cambodia. I thought travel by freighter would be the best way to get to Europe with the little bit of money I could put together. When I got to New Orleans, I spent my time considering getting out of the States by freighter. I came across another fellow at a pub one night in the French Quarter who had the same idea, so we decided to investigate the chances of working on a freighter to England. Our thought was simple, too simple, we were teenagers. An area of the teenager's brain that is well-developed early on is the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain that seeks pleasure and reward.

The nucleus accumbens is a key brain region involved in the reward system, motivation, and pleasure, playing a significant role in addiction and reinforcement learning.

Of course, LSD no doubt keeps the teenage brain still intact when it becomes older too; like in the thirties and maybe even – gulp, 60’s as I am now 67 and still not getting the frontal lobe to work like other adults in the decision-making process. and to teenagers the simpler a thought the easier it was to carry out. We would go to England, meet some girls, see the Beatles and spend the summer there and come back for the next Mardi Gras. I had my passport and Fredrick K..., the person I met at the pub that wanted to go to England had his passport too. We started off at the Seven Seas Bar which in the 1960s was on St. Phillip just off Decatur, near the wharfs asking the stevedores if there was any work for passage available on a ship to England. One night whilst getting way to drunk we met some merchant seamen who said that we could stow away on a ship easier than get a job and that if we the did it right not only would we not get caught but we could have our meals and get ourselves to London in a few weeks. They took us aboard their freighter and said that it was going straight to England, and they showed us around, telling us that if the captain did not find out we would have no problems. We were to stay in one of the holds of the ship, coming out late at night then we could go into the kitchen and help ourselves to food. It all seemed so simple we could not believe we had not thought of it to begin with. When we got to England all we would need to do would be to go down a ladder on the side of the ship and swim ashore.

Looking back, I realize how stupid it all was but then I have done so many things in life that looked like a great idea at the time but after the event was incredibly stupid. I suppose the question I keep asking is whether who we are now we will wish was not us at a future time just as we look at who we were at another time and wonder why we did not do something about who we were then, so we would have been someone different then. Of course, if we were in more control of who we were then that would have affected who we are now and we would not be who we are now but more of an extension of who we were then. Meaning that if we were a big jerk then we no doubt would be a bigger jerk now which unfortunately is the case with so many people but of course not me.

At the time, 1967, I was sharing an apartment with a girl I had met in Baltimore whilst hitchhiking south. Now, more than three decades later I only remember a few people that I shared a moment with from so long ago. I find it amazing now that I would be intimate with someone that I did not know anything about but perhaps that is my age speaking in paranoia linguistics due to everything
from being into too many wrong momentary relationships to being conscious of all the diseases that are being carried. In the sixties (and seventies) there was no thought of protection against disease. In the late 1960s, when I was living in San Francisco I would get venereal disease more often than one should. It was simple then, just go to the VD clinic get a shot of penicillin wait a week and be back at it. I ended up in many a sexual relationship with women I met at the clinic – we would celebrate the end of our week ‘fast’ by starting off together, figuring we were cured. Back in 1967 I did not even know about sexual diseases. I only knew a woman could get pregnant and the one thing I would be sure of was that she was on the pill and that was the end of the matter. If she was not on the pill then I would try to pull out to safety in time but that did not always work. Saying that means I could be the father of anyone born between 1966 and 1980 (in theory) that lived between New York and California at the time.

In Baltimore in 1967 whilst hitchhiking to New Orleans, I found myself staying in a house with a group of people about my age. I have no recollection of how I got there but I do remember sharing a few days and nights with a girl in the house. She had never been with a male before and said she was in fact a lesbian but for some reason she liked me and therefore I became her first male sexual partner. She decided to go to New Orleans with me and we hitched hiked there staying overnight in a hotel in Nashville. When we got to New Orleans we got a furnished apartment together and we must have worked to pay for our living but for the life of me I cannot recall what either one of us did. I know at one point she began to tell me she loved me and that was quite strange for her as she did not ever think she would love a male. At the same time, I was working with Fredrick K... on how to stow away on a freighter to England. I did not tell the girl I was with because she was telling me that I had changed her life and that we would spend the rest of our life together. I remember her as being quite possessive and I think crazy though I am unable to recall why. I just know now, that at that time, I wanted to get away from her and at the same time I wanted to go to England and see the Beatles and meet some English females because at the time I was really attracted to them – even though the only English females I had seen were on television. Years earlier I had a pen pal in London and I thought she was quite ‘cool’ and beautiful. Of course, we were both about 14 at the time but we kept track of one another for a few years. I thought I would find her when I got to England because life was like that – simple and whenever/whatever we wanted would happen. I still believe that but I have never really gotten the results to prove that life is simple and whatever we want to happen does. Though today, to slightly contradict what I just said, I got a snow day.

It is a strange notion that we are where we are now but (re)living another time as if we are in that moment. I am writing this on Friday, February 06, 2004, in my writing room overlooking a park in Round Lake, New York. The reason I can have this indulgence is due to the falling snow and freezing rain and the fact the schools are closed.

The situation is that I teach at the State University of New York at Albany which gives me the luxury of thinking about the past and writing this short history of how I got to where I am now in life with its constant webs of experiences, some of which I really wish had not happened. If there are other lives that we live on this planet and other lives we live in other dimensions and various bodies of different makeup, some physical some not and we could go to those other times and spaces whilst staying in our current physical form and have conscious control of going back and forth what would we know about life that we don’t know now? I go back to when I was in New Orleans in 1966 or to August 16, 2003, or any other date of the past 50 years and I remember it all so clearly and I close my eyes and recreate the emotions, words, actions… of that experience.

However, I cannot go back any further to when I had my first few experiences after I was adopted in October 1950 at the age of three.
Did I exist before then? Though it is a strange notion maybe it was soon before I was adopted that I came to this planet because I remember nothing before then. There are some schools of thought that believe some people do this and I think the term is ‘first born’ though I do not know why. In the ‘first-born’ scenario, some wandering through time and space type of being takes over the body of someone who has died for some reason at a very young age. Not dying from a disease or accident, the person just dies, they leave their body and go on and live in whatever other dimension they have to live in or where they were before incarnating in this physical plane. The being may have only needed to experience the birth process for some reason, and the person that takes over the body did not need to experience the birth process but needed to experience life on earth. The reason I think that this was my fate is because I do not remember anything early on in my life but then again, most people don’t anyway so I am really just talking out my ass. I had a ‘Master Spiritual Teacher’ tell me I was a ‘first-born’ once. The other reason I believe this could be true is because I feel no connection with the earth. I often wonder ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ Now, all these years later, I have met many people who say the same thing. Why do I have these thoughts and these experiences and is there a purpose for them and what is it that I am supposed to learn? Now I am back in those early moments of my next adventure, which could have had tragic results, but in fact was just a bit more of an annoyance and prevented me from experiences the first of three events that I wanted to experience but each time something happened to prevent the events becoming my experience too. These events that I was on my way to but missed by just a bit were the ‘summer of love’ (1967) in San Francisco, ‘Woodstock’ (1969) and the Altamont Rock Festival of 1969. And of course, I missed being a famous poet and writer back in the early 1970’s because humanity did not recognize my gifts. Well stuff them!

We looked around the ship. It was huge and the people we met, who were similar in age to us, were Swedish as well as was the freighter. We were shown the hold that we would hide in, coming up only at night to find something to eat in the kitchen. Our new friends said we could sit on the deck at night too and that no one cared whether we were on board except for the captain. It all seemed like such a good idea that we went back to our homes and collected our stuff. I do not know where Fredrick K... was staying but when I got to where I was staying the ‘girlfriend’ was not there and I was able to pack my belongings and take what I could find to eat, and I met Fredrick somewhere along the way and we climbed aboard the gangplank and went into the hold. The hold had fifty-pound bags of rice – though it was only about half full. It was covered with a huge canvas. The doors of the hold were standing upright next to the giant hole that we were in. We made a little cubby house type in the corner. The ship was due to sail the next afternoon and we spent our first night in our hollowed-out area of rice bags. We each had few belongings; Fredrick had a guitar and some clothes I just had a change of clothes and we had a bag of groceries, so we could
get by the first couple of days. I have often found that I have done things in life without thinking ahead of any consequences for what I was doing, and this was surely one of my biggest and dumbest non- thought out events of my life. Of course, I would come to make this my signature move – doing non- thought-out stuff all with bad consequences. I also did not consider at the time, actually I am just thinking about it now for the first time, what must have gone through my girlfriend’s mind. I totally forgot about her until now, thirty-eight years later, and what it may have been like for her. She would have come home only to see no trace of me anywhere – I suppose she would have assumed that I just left without saying anything but maybe she thought something else happened. Could she have thought that I was taken by aliens? Well probably not, few people come up with ideas like that, but she may have called the police and reported me as a missing person. Of course, the police would have pointed out that since all my belongings were gone it was clear that I had had a gut full of her and I was headed down the highway. I had not given her any indication that our relationship was coming to such a grinding halt, and she may have come back to our apartment that evening all excited about something or the other that she wanted to share with me. What if she was coming home that night all excited with a bottle of champagne to tell me she was pregnant?

Maybe she was going to tell me we were going to have triplets and low and behold I was not there. Now in retrospect it was quite a mean thing to do and I should at least have left her a note;

‘Sorry to leave you like this love but I am off to see the Beatles and find some British girls to make love with – I am sure you would want to do the same thing if you could. Thanks for the memories and I hope you find another male or a female or maybe one of each that you can love. And if you are having triplets – I hope they will make you happy. And just because I was the only male you ever fucked I am sure I am not the father of your unborn triplets’.

But I didn’t.

So often in life we have no idea what we are doing or what is the results of our actions as we go plundering other’s lives on our trip through our own life. It is strange to imagine that I may have gotten someone pregnant back in the 1960s and that somewhere there is some thirty-five-year-old that wonders who their father is. As one who was adopted, I used to wonder about my birth parents, or my alleged birth parents and now that I have found my birth family from my mother’s side, I am not that interested in my bloodline. My father seems to be a mystery and my grandmother (I met her in 2002 for the first time says she tossed me away) says only that he was a passing sailor that was in town back in 1946 following the end of one of those wars that the Yanks get themselves involved with, and no one knows who he is. Of course, I know my grandmother is lying and that she knows who my father is and won’t tell me for some reason or the other. Could someone be doing the same about me and will I ever know and if I did know would it make a bit of difference to my life? Probably not.

Nevertheless, anything to do with the girl I was momentarily living with had no part of my thinking then and only just this passing curiosity now as I write this.
We went up on to the deck, climbing a ladder at the end of the hold that first night. It was all so exciting to know that within a few weeks we would be in England, seeing the Beatles and making love to British girls20F (Not that it has anything to do with this part of the story, but eighteen years later I would find myself in England and I did get one of those English girls ~ New Year’s Eve, 1985, as I was passing through London. She wrote me months later when I was back in Australia that she was in love with me and would like to come to Australia. I never answered and in fact moved the next week without leaving a forwarding address. I never got to see the Beatles).

Neither one of us had been in a foreign country before except for Canada nor that does not exactly count as a foreign place. In fact, Americans are more foreign to Canadians than Canadians are to Americans. We had passports and that was all we needed according to the young Swedish stevedores that we had spoken to. If we went through customs we would be fine, and we would do that by asking someone when we got on land where the customs place was – how could anything possibly go wrong? The next afternoon our excitement increased when we saw the huge doors go down over the hold of the ship that we were in. There was about a foot around the doors of the hold, so we could climb up the bags of rice and look out. In the evening the ship began its voyage to England and we watched it move out into the middle of the Mississippi River. When it became night, we went on the deck and as we were told to do, stayed only in our area of the ship where we were told the captain never went. I remember making some sandwiches in the kitchen and sitting on the deck for quite some time as the ship eventually got into the open ocean and the land became forgettable lights in the distance. (A metaphor of my life is based on this: the ground I once stood on is nothing more than a forgettable light in the distance) We went to our hollowed-out area amongst the rice bags and slept the night away. In the morning we climbed up to see what we could see. The ship did not seem to be moving but we often had seen ships sitting out to sea but that was only when they were waiting to come into port and we had a long journey before that should happen.

We assumed we would only see the open ocean but instead of sky and water we saw land and it was not at a distance. We were very close to land and the ship had stopped. The engines must have been at the other end of the ship because we did not hear them at any time of our, so far, two-day voyage.
The ship bumped into the land, or the land bumped into the ship, I can only assume it was one of those two just as so often when I think there is only one way for an event to unfold another way pops up – but whatever the event-equation or the moment’s horizon was, the result was that there was a dock and the ship was being tied up to it. We knew this was not New Orleans but we could not imagine where we were. The huge doors of the hold opened, and we thought we had been caught and now we would be in trouble maybe even arrested and sent to jail. But instead of anyone looking for us cranes began loading things into the hold that we were in. The middle of the hold was almost empty when we began the voyage, and it was obvious that the ship had stopped at the next port to load more crap to take to England. Because the doors of the hold did not open over the whole hold, we were still way out of sight maybe five meters or more from where the action was. I think most of the cargo being put on board was bags of grain or beans or rice. It was late afternoon when the activity stopped, and the ship began to sail. It was whilst it was moving that the doors of the hold closed. Unlike before when there was a lot of light between the doors and the hold this time it was completely dark when the doors closed. We had a flashlight and we began moving the bags around to get to the middle of the hold to where the doors met the hold, so we could see outside and to eventually make our way to the opposite side where the ladder going up to the kitchen was located. But we were unable to shift the bags. From where we were located they appeared to be packed all the way to the top of the hold. There were too many to move. It did not take us long to begin to panic and feel as if we were trapped – it was becoming harder to breathe and it was unbearably hot. Out of sheer terror and panic we began to bang on the roof of where we were with cans of food. We banged for quite some time and yelled though we knew our yelling would not be heard through the thick steel floors.

The will to live is so strong in all life forms whether it is in an insect or a human. We will do anything to persevere and save our lives no matter what will befall us in the future. Some people go to incredible odds to survive. But then there are some who give up so easy and just believe the only way out is to die. I have never felt the urge to die, maybe a little last New Year’s (2004) when I felt so sad about starting another new year, but for the most part no matter how bad things have gotten in my life I have never wanted to just go and kill myself or let myself die in a situation. I may have taken too many sleeping pills when my girlfriend left me but that was just to get out of the moment not to get out of the rest of my life and there have been several relationships that I have had that I took too many drugs or drank too much alcohol or drove dangerously or did some other reckless thing when they were over, but I never consciously thought that to die was the best way out of the moment. At the age of 19 I had never known anyone who had taken their own life and I doubt that I had even heard of someone at the age of 19 or 20 ending their life because the future looked too bleak. All my life no matter how terrible or difficult the moment was I always knew it was just that moment; that it was a cycle and usually not the cycle itself but just a part of the cycle that was bad not the rest of the life. It was not until later in life I would come across anyone who would end their life because they could not see beyond the moment they were in. And what I would see after it was too late for me to say ‘don’t end your life please – because in so many ways you are that part of my life that I would never have wanted to die…’ but that would be long off into the future from when and where I was banging on a roof of a hold of a ship somewhere in the United States South sometime long ago;

Once  upon a time A long time ago 
There  was you and me Together. 

The ship was still moving when the doors opened, and we were able to push enough bags out of the way and climb toward the open hatch. It was night-time but there were lights shining on us to show clearly, we were there – the ship had to turn around and go back to port. Police came and took us off to jail in Mobile, Alabama. Apparently, the captain of the ship was very angry because he lost a day of sailing by taking us back to port and he pressed charges of stowing away against us. A policeman who was quite negative took us to our cell.

We were from the north and people from the south did not take well to their concept of Northernism as they still had issues with the results of the Civil War. The white people still had problems with black people. I never understood it all because the only reason someone is black, or white is because that is the body they were born into and that does not mean a whole lot – just like I may get into a black car or a white car. I may be in a white body this time if there is such a thing as other lifetimes, but it is just the vehicle that I am navigating through this life with and not totally who I am. But in Mobile, Alabama in the 1960s there seemed to be a lot of hostility between the dominant whites in society and anyone that was not white and from the south and they hated anyone who was white and from the North. Of course, I was only from the North because that is where I was from – born there – not a whole lot of choice about being a Yank. Somehow the fact that we were stowaways and trying to get away from the States and not Northerners coming to the south to protest the South’s treatment of non-white people seemed to escape everyone that we met.

Apparently, there had been a lot of protest marches around the same time as our sojourn in Alabama even though it was never our choice to be in Alabama to begin with. Both Fredrick K... and I had long hair – which to the Southerners was a sure sign that we were protestors come to free the blacks and to add proof to their claims that we were protesters, Fredrick had a guitar with him meaning he was one of the folk singing black-freeing troublemakers from the north that sang all those civil rights songs that pissed off the white people of the south. I think they thought he would start singing ‘we shall overcome someday…’ but he didn’t. If truth be known the fact was, that he used to play Beatle songs on his guitar which was good because we were on the way to see the Beatles. We were very confident that all he needed to do was to sing some Beatles songs when we were in London, then we would be able to get any British female we wanted, and we wanted all the ones within a few years of our age. I am not quite sure what we would have done, if we had gotten to England and every British female near our age was waiting on the shore for us. What if they all, with the large breasts that we imagined that they had, were there with their tops off waiting for our touch? We probably never had that thought but rather thought that we could just get a handful of British girls to use to the extent of our vivid imaginations when we arrived upon those sexy merry shores. I think it was Swedish girls later that I had these kinds of weird fantasies about.

Then it was the Dutch. Wow! Who would not want to have a go with a Dutch woman? (If you are not Dutch you are not much – they claim) Oh WAIT! I married one more than twenty years ago – still together – lucky me.

Of course, all this was before the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s put us men into our place and we were assured that there was more to these lovely creatures than breasts.

We endured many insults from the police who threatened to beat us and even kill us because we were white trash from the north that did not know enough to mind our own business and we should have never stuck our nose into the south. A lawyer was assigned to us because we did not have money. He told us that stowing away was a misdemeanour and that we would just be told to go back home and that would be it. There would not be jail time and because we had such a good court appointed lawyer we had nothing to worry about.

Now that I have had decades of experiences with lawyers what I know now but did not know then was that I could not believe what he said and in fact during my career of employing lawyers I have discovered to my pain that my relationship with lawyers has not been a totally satisfying one and that they are all full of shit.
We went to court in handcuffs, and it was so demeaning to be treated like a criminal when all we did was stow away on some crappy boat. We had been questioned intently and all our belongings in the hold of the ship had been recovered for some investigative type of person to determine what horrible things we were up to. Whether they thought we were civil rights workers, drug dealers, arms merchants (responsible for blowing off arms and legs) or maybe even communists did not seem to be clear. This was decades before the establishment of Homeland Security and their antics. I am sure at some point it was realized that we were just some hippies that had no money and were really trying to get ourselves to England and we had no interests in much of anything except meeting British girls. Now almost forty years later it seems so laughable that I was so set on meeting British girls. And that is the story of life for most of us, we imagine how something will be and the results are nothing like we thought it would be but because we are doing the human experience thing we seldom learn, or at least I don’t, the first few times and go rushing forward believing that the next thing we are so passionate about will be the real and rightful thing. Of course, I have learnt finally, I think, that it does not matter where the person is from or what colour or culture or belief system they are from because we can have a good time or a bad time with anyone from any stereotype category that is possible.

We had already featured as a cover story on the main newspaper of Mobile, ‘Stowaways found on board’ and there was a photo of Fredrick K... and I standing in the hold of the ship with bags of rice or beans or whatever around us. I still remember the paper clipping saying that “stevedores had found Terry Adsit, 19 of no fixed address and Fredrick K... of Boston stowing away on a ship bound for…” well I don’t know now where exactly it was bound but I had believed at the time we were headed for England. Our lawyer, like all lawyers, as I have come to discover over and over, did nothing for us and the judge told us that he could only give us six months in a Federal Prison as that was the maximum sentence for stowing away but at least we would get our hair cut. Because we had gone over state lines or far enough out into the Gulf of Mexico to have left US territory or a combination of the two it became a federal issue. I was so upset by all this that I called him a white trash judge and he said that with a comment like that he should give me a longer sentence. Fortunately for us we were given just the six months and sent back to our cell to wait transportation to a federal prison in Florida. The police made more threats, but nothing was carried out and the next day we were put into the back of a car and taken by two federal marshals to Florida. It took a whole day. We stopped for meals along the way. All the time we were handcuffed and had a chain linking the two of us together. We got lots of stares when we went into places to eat and I am sure people saw us as very dangerous criminals being guarded all the time by two federal marshals with shotguns in hand. We were two skinny young kids that had tried to stowaway on a ship, and we were surely of no danger to anyone and definitely not a danger to America. I suppose in today’s world of paranoia we would be taken to Guantanamo Bay if we were caught stowing away. We would be classified as terrorists and that would be it – Homeland Security would have us put away without trial or notification to our families; so being caught stowing away in 1967 was a lot better than being caught by federal authorities in the United States police state of 2004.

The place we were taken to, I think, was in Tampa, Florida. There were huge walls with guard towers. I was taken into a room and hosed down in case I had any weird diseases, or it would be discovered that I had put white paint all over myself and in fact was a black person posing as a white person. But even after being hosed down, I was still white, and I suppose that gave the southern prison guards something more to be upset about. Of course, I wasn’t one of them anyway because I was a Yank. Then my clothes were taken, and I was given my new set of clothes with a number on it and shown my new home. It was like a city, with a miniature golf course, movie house, playing fields, library and many barracks that were to become our home. It was a very scary place with lots of males following me around and at first trying to be friendly then graduating to the point of being aggressive. In the whole time there I only met one other person besides Fredrick K... I could relate to and he was a college student who had been caught with half a joint of marijuana in Texas and was given a life sentence in a federal prison. He could still be in jail now and for the rest of his life just because he had a very small amount of marijuana in his possession, and he had the misfortune of being in the State of Texas at the time. I have always been amazed at how America gets into a froth about another country and what they are doing with their citizens and at the same time they treat their own with such distain. For example, how many people are sentenced to death for crimes they have not done? Texas leads the country with killing off people that may or may not have carried out some crime. America is so far behind other countries that it is difficult to consider it is a civilized country.

When other countries treat their citizens so poorly America goes off and bombs them like they did in Iraq or Yugoslavia and many other places. Or how they can say another country does not have democracy because of voting irregularity when George Bush Junior does not get the vote of the people to become President but only does so because his brother is governor of Florida and he does not allow all the votes which would have put Al Gore into the presidency. If another country had pulled such dishonesty and fraud America would have bombed them but because there is no country strong enough to police America like it does the rest of the world nothing happens. I never vote in America because I know it does not matter. Who will be president is already decided and what we common folks decide really has no effect on the outcome.
That I survived my six months in Florida still amazes me. I did not get raped though I was threatened a lot and one night I was dragged into the shower by a bunch of people and everyone, including the guards, watched me take a shower because they said I was from New York City and that I was a hippy and no one had seen me take a bath that day and hippies were dirty and they all stood and cheered as I showered and I thought about how this is such a civilized country that I live in.

I met guys in there that loved prison and said when they got out they would do another crime just to get back in because everything they wanted was here – they had lovers, food, some learnt to read and write because a high number of people I came across had either never been to school or had done so little that they had not learnt to read or write. Not that I was such an academic, having about year ten learning if that at the time. The difference being that I was a poet, writer, deep thinker, and they were idiots.

The closest I came to get myself really hurt was my short-lived journey into black-white relations in the south. Because I considered the white folks, I met a bunch of hicks that were pretty much brain dead I thought I would befriend a black person.

There was a definite line of discrimination in the prison – the blacks and the whites were never together. This was in 1966 when these mindsets should have been a thing of the past. Of course, now, forty-years later, 2006 – little has changed and America is just as racist as it ever was. trump and his racist republicans (all of them) have made America racist again. But in this prison the blacks ate on one side of the cafeteria and the whites on the other. It was the same for golf, baseball, basketball and movies and even in the place we slept.

One day I played miniature golf with a black fellow, and I was pushed to the ground and kicked in the middle of the game by several white people and the rest of the time there I was threatened and called names. I worked in the laundry, and I have few memories of that. My only other memory of the place during those six months was one morning at breakfast I bit into my pancake and there was a bitter taste in my mouth, and I looked down and there was half a cockroach left in my pancake. I could barely eat another meal.

Fredrick K... got out of prison before I did though I do not know why. I think his parents had something to do with it. I never heard from him again. I was told when my release date was, but I did not tell anyone because there were several people who made some threats against me; from sexual threats to bodily injury ones, not that there is much difference. The day came, and I went to the departure place. They had thrown away my clothes I had on when I came in and they had a suit for me to wear. I was given twenty dollars and a bus ticket to New York City. That was it.

In the six months I was in prison the world changed and I was not a part of it. The summer of love was in the magazines and on television. Young people from all over the world were going to San
Francisco. I read in Time magazine that they were called ‘flower children’ and there was a lot of getting high, making love and the music had changed from the Beatles to the sounds of San Francisco. When I came out of jail the number one song was The Door’s song ‘Light my Fire’ and the other top song at the time was Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’. Here I was going to Greenwich Village in New York City following the summer of love when the hippy movement was at its finest hour and I had very short hair; so short in fact that people thought I was a narcotics agent and few would have anything to do with me.

It is so different now with people going to jail just to say they did, so they can rap about it and be tough and sell their music.

I could not locate the people I used to hang around with and I did not feel like I belonged anywhere. I got a job within a few days at the furthest point east on Long Island, Montauk Point. For several months in 1967 I worked in the kitchen cooking and cleaning and saving all my money. I think what I was really doing was letting my hair grow back and hiding until I could look like the other people my age that I wanted to hang around with. I spent Christmas 1967 back in New York City but I have few recollections of that period. I had an apartment on 9th Street in Greenwich Village. I did a fast-for-peace at Saint Marks Church at 131 E. 10th Street as part of the Poetry Project that had begun the year before. I read a poem I had written, and the only significance of that event was the presence of the poet Alan Ginsburg, the father of the hippie movement. Several other famous poets and activist writers also read at it. Most likely they are dead or at least long forgotten now or maybe both; dead and long forgotten.

Isn’t it amazing how important the moment is? Years later it is difficult to remember the moment we thought was so important. At the age of 58 and a half, I have given up on any moment being important. Maybe this moment is important because I am writing this – but in the future, when no one has read this for many decades or even centuries and yes, millenniums, what then this moment’s significance? If that isn’t a downer – what about millions of years? Billions of years? Light years? What importance? This moment it is not. Here is a real big downer – what about when our Sun becomes a black hole – how about when our galaxy becomes swallowed by a black hole – gosh it gets muddled, thinking how important this moment really is. I am going to bed. It is 9.38 PM on a Tuesday and I must be on the freeway to go to work at 6.30 AM. The importance of this moment? It is important to stop writing for a while and take a nap.

I remember having several girlfriends but none of them stood out that I remember now until I met Eileen Busby. Though there was another one just forgot her name – but she got run over by a bus in Greenwich Village. This was not while I lived with her – I only heard about it a year after the event and I was living elsewhere at the time. Now I remember, Betty Wise – or something like that. That name sounds suspect though.

Eileen was my first ‘serious’ girlfriend that I spent any length of time with and I was with her for more than a year making her about the fifth longest relationship that I have had in the past fifty years of relationships. Considering I am on my second marriage now that is not saying much for relationships and me, a great example of Saturn/Pluto conjunct Venus and Mars conjunct Uranus in Gemini in the eighth house, with Mars ruling my seventh house.

My longest relationship so far was Kris from January 1995 until October 2000 though we never lived together, my second longest was my first marriage from March 1980 until October 1984 and my third longest is the one I am in now from January 2001 (now going strong after more than three years, of course now whilst re- editing this for the zillionth time it is early 2006 making my second marriage the longest. And to add to my current edit, it is 2021 and my second marriage is officially my longest relationship being 21 years.) Of course, Narda and I have those ‘Cinderella’ aspects between our Jupiter and Chiron that the ‘Magi Astrology mob waffles on and on about. I was in a few relationships that were on and off for a year or two and a few that overlapped one another as relationships sometimes do and lots and lots of ones that lasted from a few moments to a few days and of course to a few minutes. I wonder if there are relationships that last for millions of years. Perhaps between planets. I have had three relationships that came and went and came and went and we were together sometimes and at other times we weren’t. We kept contact with one another just as I did with Chialeah and Robyn and Rita.

I kept track of Robin Harper (appearing later – in 1973 of this short story) from when we first got together in New Orleans in 1973 until the end of the 1990s. Just recently I received an email that she had died, and I had no way to think about that. Rita, my first girlfriend, and I were on and off for a couple of decades as we lived in different places. Eileen, however, was the first female I travelled and lived in different cities with.

16. Eileen

Return to Home Page