December 20, 2003

• Memories…

  not my memories, but memories of me…

  Greyfox says I now have “street
  cred” with the rehab ranchers and ranchettes, whatever that is. 
  Credibility is what I suppose he means.  It’s not exactly what I
  would have chosen, not in that milieu anyhow, but there it is.

  One of the men who rides the van
  I drive as a volunteer, taking residents from the rehab center to
  Narcotics Anonymous meetings, recognized me.  He grew up in the
  Willamette Valley where I rode with bikers for a few years before I got
  into speed chemistry and then prison, in the late 1960s.  He was a
  teenager at the time, a decade or so younger than I.

  He asked me one night at a
  meeting if I’d ridden with bikers in that area and I acknowledged that
  I had.  Then he expressed the supposition that I knew a lot of
  Free Souls.  He mentioned a few names and some of them did sound
  familiar, but the name of the club, Free Souls, rang no bells with me
  at the time.  The conversation just sorta fizzled, faded away.

  Then, one day a week or two ago,
  here at home alone, suddenly “Free Soul MC” did ring a bell.  It
  should.  That was “our” club.  My ol’ man “VW”, the anonymous
  asshole who made me a biker chick for three years before I managed to
  escape, and his biker “bro’s”, started that club when we moved from
  the San Francisco Bay area to Eugene/Springfield when he got out
  of the Air Force.  They were guys he’d gone to school with there,
  plus a few newcomers to the area, and a few Bay Area bikers that moved
  north when we did.

  When that little mental block
  broke, memories and fragments of memories came cascading forth. 
  So, last Thursday night as I was driving the van I called out to that
  Oregonian man in one of the back seats and said, “You mentioned the
  Free Souls, didn’t you?”  I explained that at the time it hadn’t
  gotten through to me, but then I did recall that that had been the name
  of the club we started when we moved north.  He said, “Yeah, I
  thought you looked familiar.  I remember you from that
  time.”  He had hung with those guys after I got out of there, and
  had grown up around most of them.  We started tossing names back
  and forth.

  We discovered that both of us had
  been at the free concert in Skinner’s Butte Park on the Fourth of July
  in 1970 when the Merry Pranksters brought a truckload of electric
  watermelons and turned the crowd on.  We had both gone to the
  first of the long series of Country Faires, the local Renaissance fairs
  in the woods.  We talked about The Attic where there had always
  been good music, and about some other local landmarks we remembered.

  I asked him if he knew “Lizard”,
  and he told me he was one of the Massengill brothers he’d known all his
  life.  I said that Lizard was one of the most beautiful men I’d
  ever known.  He had this way of tossing his head to get the
  long blond hair out of his eyes, and just thinking about it,
  picturing that, could make me wet.  I heard one of the women in
  the seat behind me say to another, “Did she say, ‘wet’?”

  But our shouted conversation
  across the length of the van on that foggy night in Wasilla traffic
  didn’t pause for that.  We had moved on to Ken Kesey and the
  Pranksters.  He mentioned having heard that Ken died a few years
  ago, and I confirmed it.  We had a  moment of silence there,
  and then started talking about the Grateful Dead and the free concerts
  we’d been to.  It struck me as odd, but oddly fitting, that I
  would be remembered from some of those times I’d been dancing down
  front at those concerts that are very memorable to me.

  Then I brought up the coffeehouse
  on Willamette Street and said I couldn’t recall its name.  I said
  there was a head shop about a half block from it in ’69, and he said,
  “Yeah!  That was the Crystal Ship.”  He said he’d think about
  that coffeehouse, and have the name of it for me next time he sees me.
  [December, 2005 EDIT:  I remember!  It was the Odyssey
  Coffeehouse.]  I told him I’d have to get back into my memoirs and
  do some revising and expanding with these newly recovered
  memories.  Then I pulled in at the ranch, everyone thanked me for
  the ride, and we said good night.

  Memories, the memoirs, have
  proven to be one of the prime features of blogging, journaling, for
  me.  Another one is insight.  I guess insight is what the
  journaling was supposed to be about, why that old woman came to me in
  that dream and told me to do it.  I write down how I feel and what
  I’m thinking about, and then at some later date I go back and read it
  and see some things about myself and my life that I’d not been
  conscious of before.

  One of those things is an
  as-yet-not-fully-formed realization about me and my attitudes toward
  this damned disease.  Reading over a few recent fibro blogs it
  became apparent to me that, as debilitating as the disease is all on
  its own, I’ve been letting it keep me down in ways that aren’t
  necessarily necessary.  I hold back on some types of activity, out
  of the fear of making messes, of screwing up important tasks. 
  That’s one of my major failings, not just with this neurological shit,
  but with life in general over the whole course of its six decades
  (almost).  It’s one of the crappy things about being a
  perfectionist, and is something that I’ve known about for years and
  worked on in therapy.  Apparently, it needs more work.

  Meanwhile, today I’m working just
  to get through another day.  Thursday night’s drive to and from
  the meeting, and the ride to town and back with Greyfox driving in the
  fog, took every erg of energy I had and left me sorta set back. 
  Then yesterday, on Friday, he thought he needed a navigator to
  help him find the State Fairgrounds to set up his tables for another
  event in Raven Hall, this time the Alaska Big Bore Association’s
  Christmas Gun Show.  I went along and the ride was hell. 
  Every bump in the road, every irregular little chug of the engine on
  the way home, sent pain throughout my body.

  There was no question of my going
  with him today for the show itself, and perhaps that is my true reward
  for going last night and helping set up.  I don’t have to listen
  to his sales pitch or that of any of those other testosterone monsters
  with their big guns for sale.  …aand, if one of them is in the
  mood to trade a gun for some knives, I might end up with another pretty
  little gun of my own.  We looked at a cute little over-and-under
  .22 long rifle/.410 lightweight survival gun, and Greyfox  asked
  me if I’d like to have it, if the man wanted to barter.

  Well, this is a cold corner of
  the house, and I’ve just about exhausted my chilled fingers and my
  thoughts at this time.  I just got a new CD to add to my Xmas
  music collection, and I’m going to snuggle up on the couch by the
  woodstove and listen to it.

   

   

  • 2:42 pm
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