August 1, 2002

• The final months of 1967 were rough. VW and
  Grace were both drinking a lot, and Linda and I were not sleeping well,
  having nightmares. I botched an attempt to cut my wrists one night
  after a few beers. We four were sharing a two bedroom house in a small
  town near Eugene. The house wasn’t built for cold weather, wasn’t
  well-heated. It was a miserable winter of no work, no fun, no warmth,
  no peace.

  Things started looking up in the spring. VW went to work in the
  woods, setting chokers. It was dangerous and strenuous, but he handled
  it okay. VW and I moved into an apartment by ourselves in a strip that had to
  have started out as a motel. I attempted my first marijuana crop there,
  but my landlady’s dog and cats chewed up my plants and rolled on them.
  I thought it wisest not to complain.

  It was there that I subscribed to the Time-Life Foods of the World
  cookbook club. I began learning about wines, and expanded my repertoire
  to include several Scandinavian, European, Mediterranean, Caribbean and
  Polynesian cuisines, as well as expanding my already considerable
  knowledge of Mexican cuisine. I kept a stock pot always simmering on
  the back of the stove. Every day VW came home to a new dish. Some were
  not ever attempted again. We discovered that we shared a general
  aversion to Scandinavian fare, and little fondness for most German food.

  Other than those few less-than-perfect dining experiences, we both
  had a lot of fun with my culinary experiments. Besides the
  international cuisine, I was getting adept at pastries and fancy
  desserts and had started improvising my own complex recipes, which I
  could never duplicate. I’ve never been much good at the sort of
  “experimental” cooking that goes on in commercial kitchens where the
  recipes are measured and recorded. My talents run more toward combining
  a bit of this with a shake of that and cook until done. The meals were
  enhanced by my shoplifting only the best wines to go with them.

  We were also having fun working on our show bike. It was an old
  knucklehead engine, from the 1930s. I designed and built a stepped-up
  seat that provided VW with a foam backrest that was the front of my
  seat. He rode low, almost reclining, arms hanging from ape-hanger
  handlebars, with extended front forks about a mile out in front, and
  foot pegs placed far forward for comfort. His head was about even with
  my abdomen.

  My foot pegs were high, and designed to work in concert with my seat
  and the sissy bar behind it, to keep me in position effortlessly. I
  designed the sissy bar so that it bent back and flared out slightly at
  the top, forming a cradle where my helmet would rest. It rose a few
  inches above the top of my helmet. The bike went through a series of
  modifications, always some part in primer or being wire-brushed to
  prepare it for chrome plating. It was almost always on the road, a rare
  thing for a Harley chopper. Riding it was more important to both of us
  than showing it, so we took care of the engine in preference to the
  paint and chrome.

  Sleeping on that bike was easy, as was rolling joints. My part of
  riding it was a snap because of the seat/sissy bar combo I’d designed.
  VW’s part was a real challenge. We had purchased a prototype of a
  high-performance cam that never made it into production: too radical.
  The engine had to be revved ‘way up to start off, or it would stall.
  The only way to take off on that bike was with a wheelie. Wheelies were
  illegal, more challenge for VW. One of the first times we rode it with
  that cam, before the sissy bar was done, we were leaving a screening of
  Wild Angels or Hells Angels on Wheels, one of the exploitation flicks
  that had real outlaw bikers in them. There were a bunch of us there,
  all pulling out into the street at once. VW might have wanted to make a
  little extra impression. He took off a bit fast, brought the bike up
  higher than usual, and I clung to him, hearing the loud “thock…
  thock… thock…” of my fiberglas helmet bouncing on the pavement
  before the two of us managed to force the front wheel down.

  Once the sissy bar was finished and installed, wheelies like that
  one would just trail a shower of sparks behind us as it scraped the
  road. VW could take off without anything more than a little bounce of
  the front wheel if he wanted to. Most of the time (and always on gravel
  or dirt surfaces) that was the way he did it. But when we were out in a
  pack, on smooth concrete or asphalt, we braced ourselves and went for
  the show.

  Often, usually late in drunken evenings on runs, someone would
  suggest that we find a nice level parking lot so the guys could try
  riding our bike in reverse. With the three-wheeler transmission we had,
  ours was the only motorcycle I’ve ever seen with a reverse gear. Of
  course, this practice was not good for our plastic molding or deep
  lacquer finish, or the egos and physical integrity of the drunken
  bikers who tried it, but we were having too much fun riding to
  seriously regret not having a bike for show.

  The new club, the Free Souls gained more members, including some of the former Gypsy
  Jokers and their friends. We began some Oregon traditions like those
  we’d left in California, such as making annual runs to the coast for
  the Florence Rhododendron Festival, or to other holiday events within a
  few hours’ ride. In Eugene, we were well into the anti-war protests on
  the campus at U of O. The student union cafeteria was a hangout for all
  the hippies, dissidents and misfits in the area, not just students. A
  drive-in restaurant across from the campus was another general hangout,
  as was a coffeehouse on Willamette Street.

  One afternoon on campus, we ran into Loose Lew and Mardy, who had
  recently arrived from the Bay Area. From then on, we always partied
  together, and she’d come to my house sometimes and we’d schmooze in my
  kitchen as she washed my accumulated dirty dishes. I’ve always been an
  indifferent housekeeper and excellent cook. I’ve had a number of
  friends who exchanged scullery work for my cuisine. At the big dinner
  parties we threw, I was usually off the hook for the cleanup. Happy,
  win-win situations.

  Mardy’s life had some correspondences with mine.  Both of us
  were redheads, which was a big bonding factor, it being the planet’s
  smallest ethnic group.  She had lost three
  kids, not simply to adoption, but had them taken by a court when she
  and Lew were declared unfit parents due to the biker connections and a
  string of petty crimes. But in many ways we were different, polar
  opposites: she lost her appetite when nervous or depressed, while I
  found comfort in food. She was passive-aggressive, held simmering resentments and plotted
  revenge for every slight. I was openly aggressive, reacted swiftly in anger, usually with
  verbal assault, and then let things go. She was the housewifey type,
  fond of kitschy decor, always cleaning even in my house, which was
  great for me because I had much more important work to do in the garage.

  Lew and Mardy moved around a lot, and she called me frequently,
  usually when something had gone wrong and she needed to talk, or when
  she had done something particularly outrageous and needed to crow to
  someone or get a few bucks to get out of jail or out of town. Whenever
  she got into a “one phone call” situation, I was her one call. Then it
  was up to me to call a lawyer, a bondsman, her mom, etc.

  At no time in my life have I stopped trying to learn, to educate and
  improve myself. While I was with the bikers, especially for the time
  before we moved to Oregon and away from the heavy Hells Angels
  influence, that energy was largely channeled into mechanics, cuisine,
  and learning to live in a foreign culture. In Eugene, I tried to return
  to nurse’s training, and did for a few months work in a hospital and
  attend classes at Lane Community College. Then I got sick again.
  Hospitals seem to do that to me.

  It couldn’t have come at a worse time from my perspective. I’d made
  my first moves to get free of VW. He had agreed to separate, having
  found a new girlfriend who turned him on. I found an apartment of my
  own and we were getting packed to move, he to his parents’ and me to my
  place near the hospital. I went to work one night on the midnight
  shift, and before the shift was over I was in bed as a patient. It was
  one of the Asian strains of influenza that swept the world in the
  sixties.

  The aftermath wasn’t as debilitatingly severe as after the medical
  mistake a few years before, but it came close. VW was out of work at
  the time. I ended up unemployed and living under my father-in-law’s
  roof and subject to my mother-in-law’s less-than-tender mercies. He
  picked on her and she in turn picked on everyone else.

  They had, for extra income, two old pensioners rooming there. Lars
  and Elmer had the roughest time of all of us. Gimpy old farts all bent
  over and vague, they subsisted on meager cold cereal breakfasts,
  bologna sandwiches and canned soup for lunch, and dinners that were
  nothing to shout about. Except for meals, they were expected to stay
  out of the kitchen and out of the way, either in their rooms or
  outside. They were not allowed in the living room.

  I was welcome to do any of the household chores I abhorred, but was
  not permitted to cook in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, to sit in my
  father-in-law’s chair, or express any opinions contrary to theirs.
  “Our” room was the attic. Before we moved a bed up there and our little
  stereo, it had been home to bats. They kept coming back after we moved
  in, too. My only pleasant memories of that place and time involved my
  father-in-law’s workshop (he was a machinist, like my father), their
  horses, the beautiful land of their ranch, and music. I was listening
  to Ravi Shankar, The Monkees, Jefferson Airplane, Beatles, Rolling
  Stones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix… psychedelic sounds.

  VW got another job and we spent a lot of time on the road with the
  Free Souls. The club had attracted about seventeen members and
  prospects by then, I think. We could put enough bikes on the road to
  make a good show.

  On the Fourth of July weekend, we rode to Florence, on the coast.
  That night, in the beachside campground, Skip Cremeans, a Eugene biker
  who had previously lost one testicle to his handlebars when a car ran a stop sign in
  front of him, walked over to us and held out a handful of small, fat
  orange pills: “Orange Sunshine”. He said, “take two, they’re small.”
  Everyone there took at least two. They were four-hit tabs, so everyone
  definitely had a threshhold dose.

  Not more than two or three of those present had ever had
  psychedelics before. We were all wandering around disoriented. I recall
  that to me everyone’s face looked like that of a painted doll or
  marionette, unreal and phony. I soon tired of trying to explain this
  perception to someone, and lay on my back on a picnic table to watch
  the light show in the sky. When I pointed out the coruscating patterns
  of lines and angular forms to someone else, they apparently couldn’t
  see them.

  As dawn came, I found a dew-spangled spider web across a path and
  gazed at it for a few years, then watched a bunch of birds that no one
  else could see, swooping and soaring along the beach of an island
  offshore. VW was freaked and not communicating very well, unwilling to
  even try to ride his bike, as were most of those who had been drinking
  a lot. The general consensus seemed to be that psychedelics and alcohol
  didn’t mix well. Skip and those who were more experienced with acid
  worked on talking down the freaky ones. I was in observation mode,
  tired of trying to discuss what was going on.

  Late in the morning we got back on the road, and I suppose we seemed
  normal enough when we walked into my mother-in-law’s kitchen. She told
  me to slice a watermelon for the old guys. I sank the knife into it and
  then watched, appalled, as the thing bled all over the countertop. But
  I kept my cool, that small corner of my awareness that understood the
  difference between hallucination and perception. For the rest of that 3
  day trip, I just tried to adjust to the altered perceptions and enjoy
  the ride without letting anyone else know where my mind was.

  VW found a job in a mill, and I went to work in an upscale Bavarian
  restaurant. We found a house on the edge of Eugene, and shared it with
  Bill and Carol, a pleasant and funny biker couple who were new to town.
  The adventures that Carol and I shared, and the events as I finally
  made my break from VW, will be coming up,

  NEXT TIME….

  • 11:22 pm
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