A Time Ago And Then

By G. B. Couper

Max, a USN submariner, is laid up in a hospital with a broken back in the late sixties: there, he begins spiritual journey that takes him through LSD,the Altamont Speedway fiasco, to the communes of New Mexico, Jamaica and drug dealing in Miami. Ending up in Santa Barbara his misadventures touch on the violence, cults and religions of the era as he struggles to find peace within himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. B. Couper
• Release date: Aug 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465784476

G. B. Couper

George Couper lives in Santa Barbara California and graduated from UCSB with a BFA in 1977. He has worked for the Arts in Corrections program as an Artist/Facilitator at Vacaville's Correctional Medical Facility for the California Department of Corrections bringing into the prison artists, writers, poets, musicians and ceramicists for workshops. He presently volunteers working with homeless addicts and alcoholics. A Time Ago and Then is his first Novel (published on Smashwords: Aug. 9, 2011). His second publication is an illustrated novella, A Taxi Romance, published Nov. 13, 2011 on Smashwords.

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A TIME AGO AND THEN:

By George B. Couper II

SMASHWORDS EDITION

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

George B. Couper II on Smashwords:

Copywrite 2011 By George B. Couper II

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook is not to be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

A Time Ago and Then is a work of fiction,. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locals is entirely coincidental.

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A TIME AGO AND THEN

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Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: Dry Dock

Chapter 2: Tripping

Chapter 3: San Francisco & Altamont

Chapter 4: The Pillow Shack

Chapter 5: A long and Winding Road

Chapter 6: Spokane

Chapter 7: Holly-Weird

Chapter 8: To Taos

Chapter 9: Risingstar

Chapter 10 Easter

Chapter 11: Magic Maya

Chapter 12: Vision Quest

Chapter 13: Going to Jamaica

Chapter 14: The Plan

Chapter 15: The Reading

Chapter 16: The Departure

Chapter 17: Passage

Chapter 18: The Belly of the Beast

Chapter 19: Dark Night of the Soul

Chapter 20: The Boots

Chapter 21: Justice

Chapter 22: Saintly Sinners

Chapter 23: The Songs of Zion

Chapter 24: Berzerkeley Blues

Chapter 25: Santa Barbara

Chapter 26: The Winds of Destiny

About the Author

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A TIME AGO AND THEN

Chapter 1: DRY-DOCK

I was Twenty-two and my Navy enlistment would have been coming to an end in seven months. Laid up in a Foster frame with three vertebrae crushed and fused together at Tripler Army General Hospital, I was in dry dock. My ship, the USS Coucal, ASR 8; i.e., eight-balled Assholes and Submarine Rejects, was also in dry dock at Pearl Harbor Shipyards after a Westpac tour but I wouldn’t be going back to her. My luck had run out over a shuffleboard machine at the Sub-Base EM club. I’d just been busted down to Seaman from Torpedoman 3rd Class for another trespass and transferred to the Coucal. I had been celebrating that misadventure with more than a few drinks.

My luck had run out on the shuffleboard machine but not because I didn’t play well. I knew every warp on the board of that damned thing: I played good alright… too good for the squids off the Coral Sea. They met me on the way back to the barracks and worked me over real well: crushed my cheekbone and a few ribs. I’d flipped over a retaining wall to get away and discovered too late that it was at least twenty feet to the pavement below. I remember saying in resignation on the way down, Oh, shit! and thinking, it is over… this is all I have to show for my life. I hadn’t those thoughts while I was getting the crap beat out of me by the Coral Sea skimmers. I was busy fighting for my hide. Had I known it would come to this I might have given them their money back. But I chose to make an unscripted exit: they took off, perhaps believing the fall must have killed me and that I could be more trouble than the few bucks I’d conned them out of was worth.

I lay there in that Foster frame after the Army surgeons knitted my vertebrae together and waited to be carted off for another surgery to patch my crushed cheekbone. One of the candy-stripers came by and gasped in horror: My God, what happened to you?

I didn’t really want to talk… I was a mess. The whole left side of my face was a swollen blob of black and blue bruised flesh. I could see through my one blurry eye that she was young, cute and innocent enough, so I answered… Oh, I got jumped by some skimmers. I made part of that up because I barely remembered the fall and, vaguely, a shuffleboard game and only a little of the scuffle.

Oh no, were they black? She had such deep brown eyes. Her sympathy was enough to stir me through the fog of morphine and pain. I hated to disappoint her… I couldn’t remember what race the skimmers were at that time either. Racial tensions were high back in those days. It was 1969 and Black Power was combined with anti-war sentiments that divided race and rank in every branch of the armed services.

Naw, they were white? I watched, with my one good eye, her expression sour.

That is horrid, to think, they were your own kind! I could have laughed, had I not been so medicated, because she looked Hawaiian with a good amount of Africa in her Wahini blood… like it would have been better had they been black: And horrid? Nobody used words like that except in old movies.

Naw, I already told you, they were skimmers. I was getting annoyed now and hoped she would go away without me having to explain that I’d earned my dolphins as diesel-boat submariner and that a skimmer (any surface ship or crewman) was an entirely different species… Hell, we were practically in a completely different Navy than even Nuke Boats. We were referred to as sewer pipe sailors by the elite nuke Navy because the diesel smell permeated everything we wore on board. We had lockers at the barracks for our dress uniforms and civvies and I was headed for the barracks when I was jumped.

By the way, how long does it usually take to recover from something like this? I was unaware that candy-stripers were just volunteers and not nurses.

I don’t know… a few weeks or maybe months? She must have been in the dark about my crushed vertebrae. She just saw my smashed up face.

I added, Uh, you do know my back is broken.

Jeeze, her brow furrowed in deep thought, How bad?

Three vertebrae, T-twelve to L-two: Crushed ‘em. Jeeze?... An Andy Hardy movie at that!

Jeeze, she said it again… knitting her brows, probably six to nine months.

Whew, I thought; it is February and my enlistment is up in August… good, I won’t have to go back to the boat… hmmm; counting on my fingers, do nine months extend past my separation date?

Just before I was being prepped for surgery on my crushed cheekbone, a brass oak-leaf Major came into my cyclopean view. I saw, on the Major’s other collar, a brass cross. Oh shit, an Army chaplain. The candy-striper was at the door watching. It was mildly embarrassing that she had to be a witness as the chaplain attempted to do his job. He picked up the clipboard from the foot of my frame, looked at my chart for a name, and slipped right into the topic of his visit.

Hello, Sean… er, Seaman McKee. Would you like me to pray for you?

No Padre… no thanks. I was kinda playing tough for the benefit of the candy-striper now but I meant it.

Are you sure you don’t want to talk or anything? the Padre was not used to being shunned, A short prayer helps before surgery.

Helps what, Father? I don’t need help.

I have seen many healthy young men think the same as you, and sometimes…

I’d heard this ministerial tone before, I’ll take my chances.

… And sometimes they don’t make it.

Well, Padre, I don’t believe in your uniform or your God. Let me go to the grave on that! On that I saw the girl in the candy-stripes turn away. The Major hesitated a minute, as though he were going to say something, but turned to go pray with someone more receptive to his calling.

I came out of the surgery alive in spite of my curses. It might have been worse. You never know when you go in for surgery… especially in an Army Hospital at a time when battles like Hill 937 were sending planeloads of 187th Infantry and 101st Airborne to Ward Ten in far worse straits than I was in. A little meat-grinder in South East Asia called Hamburger Hill was chewing up soldiers, young men the same age as me, in ways that made me feel like my problems were insignificant.

The candy-striper was there when I came out from the anesthesia. I hadn’t expected her to be anywhere near me after my outburst with the chaplain. My vision was still blurred and a patch of thick gauze covered my left eye… she appeared as a bronze angel or goddess, They call me Max, what’s your name?

Glenda.

I expected something more exotic, like Leilani. I wasn’t in pain… I wasn’t in anything… I was there and that was all there was to it. She was there too and that counted for something.

It’s just plain Glenda. How are you feeling?

Huh, a little fuzzy…

You’re in a better mood than when I last saw you. She said flatly.

Thanks to the morphine, Oh shit, I thought, more mawkish concern. Then, after a pause of more than a few uncomfortable minutes, I spoke through a thick anesthetized tongue, My mood is cheerful enough… what do you mean?

You tore into the chaplain…. He was just trying to be helpful.

How is it helpful to tell me I might die?

Don’t you think about what will happen to your soul, Max?

You tell me what a soul is, Glenda, and I might get concerned about it.

She turned to walk away and, over her shoulder added, We’ll talk about it when your mind is clearer and you’re in a better mood.

My mind is clearer than it will ever be. How am I in a bad mood?

It could be better. She smiled and walked out of sight from my one good eye.

Ward Ten was the orthopedic ward where all the broken bones, shrapnel wounds and amputees went. There were Marines, Army, Navy, an assortment of military dependents and old Korean War … even some WWII … veterans, on the ward. In my section there was a kid in the bed across from mine, a dependent of a Navy NCO barely sixteen, who suffered some form of deterioration of his bones. Billy’s head was held with pins through a halo attached to titanium rods that continued down to reinforce his spine. Because of this and my Foster Frame’s position we were the only ones we could see face to face (I wasn’t supposed to turn my head too much and, because of Billy’s rods and pins, he had no choice). The Kid (that’s the name we gave him, Billy the Kid) was dying and he knew it. He’d suffered a series of heart failures and each time they wheeled him to the E.R. seemed like it would be his last. I was intrigued with him because the Kid was always so damned cheerful. Even though he was sixteen Billy looked more like twelve. Still, he joked and goofed off with the best of us and he was considered one of the men in the ward.

…all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.

And now I know that we must lift the sail

And catch the winds of destiny

Wherever they drive my boat.

To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness

But life without meaning is the torture

Of restlessness and vague desire ---

It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

From: Spoon River Anthology

By

Edgar Lee Masters

One night a program came on the TV that the Kid insisted we watch. There were eight beds in our section and the viewing fare was picked by consensus: mostly cop-buddy shows like Hawaii Five-O or Combat reruns. But this particular night everyone ceded and allowed the kid to watch his show; The Spoon River Anthology, from an adaptation of the book of poetry written by Edgar Lee Masters. I wasn’t sure why but I looked forward to the show myself. The theme was somewhat dour as far as I was concerned and I wondered whether it might be too much for the kid. The subject of the anthology was the lives of those buried in the Spoon River graveyard speaking from their graves. After it was over was over Billy asked me; Do you believe in life after death, Max?

I adamantly did not believe in any such nonsense but I understood that the Kid was asking because he was preparing to die. Of course, I lied; Yeh, I guess so. What do you think?

I don’t know but I’m gonna find out real soon. He shrugged.

You mean heaven and hell? our section was quiet… everyone in earshot was listening. Whatever; just doesn’t make much sense does it?

No, but I’m gonna miss my folks and friends if I’m there and know it.

Good point, I was hesitant but, what the hell, the kid would know soon enough, it does seem a bit morbid when ya think of it.

Anything’s better than this. He gestured at his halo, monitor and oxygen tanks. I didn’t know what to say and the other GI’s in our section had nothing to say either. Finally, the kid spoke. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t so bad that I don’t want to live.

I was thinking, Shit, he hasn’t even had a chance to get laid yet. Next thing I knew I was making things up. I heard myself saying, Hey, maybe all this will work out for you. I knew I was lying and I knew the Kid knew it too.

Yeh, maybe it will work out.

That would be our last conversation. The alarms on the monitors went off around two a.m. That had happened several times before but, as the Docs and nurses wheeled him out to the E.R.; the finality of it sank in.

The next day at lunch Glenda wheeled in the meal cart and passed out the trays to our glum lot. Usually the battle hardened Grunts and Screaming Eagles would cheer up and chirp wittily like birds whenever a skirt like Glenda walked in the door but there was none of the usual banter.

As she set up my tray she asked about the kid. Of course, she already knew but it was more to break the silence, Were you awake when it happened?

Yeh, we all were. There was a lot of the usual noise.

You okay?

I had been biting my lip and I’d hoped she hadn’t seen it. Yeh, I’m fine. A lump the size of a golf ball was lodged in my throat. I didn’t know why but her concern stirred up something deep within me. I wanted to cry but I could not: not here in front of these other men but perhaps… just perhaps, if I were alone with Glenda… far away from the ward… perhaps I could cough up that golf ball and let the dam break. I turned my head into my pillow so she wouldn’t see the tears. Hell, I didn’t even know the Kid. He was just another bed on the ward. A nuisance… with his monitors and alarms! Damn it all to hell. The nation was at war and so was I. I was at war with myself and I was at war with God. What kind of God would make this mess?

Glenda, I called out as she was almost to the door, You still concerned about my soul?

Well… er… yes?

Don’t be. I don’t have one.

I think you do… and a good one at that. Thankfully, she left that comment hang. I watched her bronze-toned calves under the candy-striped skirt push her stainless-steel cart of trays down to the other end of the ward.

I spent my first three months at Tripler Army General Hospital on a Foster Frame I mentioned before. The Foster Frame is a contraption designed to keep one’s spine aligned while it heals. It is a sort of cot that can have another part of the cot attached, like hot-dog buns, so that I, the wiener can be flipped over without causing problems with the alignment of my vertebrae.

In other words, I lay completely prone, flipped once every four hours, for ninety days. This was made tolerable with a steady flow of pharmaceuticals prescribed, traded, swapped, donated or bought from other patients in the ward. The first week or two I had a Demerol-drip but caps or tabs of it and Darvon were my regular fare from then on. Besides that, the men back from Nam were rationed two cans of beer a day with lunch and dinner. There were enough GI’s who didn’t drink to pass on their ration to me and the other stoners. That kept us in good supply. We learned to open up a Darvon cap and empty out the Tylenol to ingest only the little red BB heart. A can or two of beer and about six of those little red B-B’s provided a pretty good buzz. Those were my distractions but; most of all, in those first three months, I read.

The first challenge was getting my eyes to work together. After the gauze was removed from my left eye I found that the right eye focused faster, but the left was cacky-wampus, causing me to see double. In order to read I had to close my left eye. This was more than I was willing to tolerate. I practiced every free minute getting the railings hung from the ceiling, holding the curtains around my cot above me to align. Seeing double at first I could only get them to align for a second or two. But, as days passed, I was able to hold the lines together for longer periods until, after a week or two, they stayed that way.

Once I was able to read with both eyes a whole new world opened up. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; the Hobbit and the Tolkien Trilogy; Norman Mailer’s American Dream; John Hersey’s The Wall and Hiroshima; Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. What the Hospital library didn’t hold momentous events; live on TV, such as the Neil Armstrong’s, giant-steppin-leap-for- man-and-mankind, moon landing occurred. These readings and events stirred my soul towards adventure… the adventure that I’d given up on. For all practical purposes I’d given up on adventure when I dumped my wrap-around sunglasses in the contraband bin upon entering boot camp. I did manage to keep a leather-bound collection of Keats in boot-camp. I had to convince my Company Commander there that it was a Bible: the Bible being the only book that was not contraband. Because it was leather bound and looked like a bible, he approved it.

Sadly, Glenda graduated from high school before I could have any of that. She bid me adieu and thanked me for the experience as she was moving to Davis, California to

study veterinary medicine; I ordered a dashiki for her, from the back of a Playboy, as a parting gift. The dashiki came just in time and she wore it to the ward on her last day as a gift to me.

Thanks, she turned to modeled it for me,

It looks better on you than a Mu-Mu.

I promise I will write you often and let you know how I’m doing. Maybe we will see each other when you get out.

I got a few letters from her after that but they stopped coming by September. I neither saw nor heard from her again.

Finally, my three months in the Foster Frame were up and I would be fitted into a body cast the next day. It was the middle of the night when I nearly sabotaged my recovery by attempting to get up and walk around a bit before being confined to the heavy, full-body, plaster-cast. After all, ninety days was plenty, as far as I was concerned, to mend a few crushed vertebrae. I thought I was special and I didn’t accept Dr.’s Orders, laws of physics or any other law.

First off, I gradually propped myself up on both elbows, keeping my back as straight as I could. As soon as my head was elevated a few feet the blood rushed from the brain and I passed out, falling back flat on the frame.

Whew! I thought. This could be serious trouble.

I lay there for about fifteen minutes and tried again. This time I was able to stay upright without passing out but was still dizzy. I swung my feet off the cot and noted the sensation of the legs filling with blood. Three months of being off one’s feet causes more than a few physical changes. First off the thick skin on the heels and pads of the feet peels off. I hadn’t given much thought of how much padding normal feet have until it all started coming off as those first weeks laid up passed. Then the cartilage in the joints becomes atrophied. As I set my feet on the floor I found out how much cushion the joints of the ankles and knees are needed. Searing pain shot out from my ankles and knees as I stood. I realized then that I might have made a serious mistake as far as my recovery was concerned and lay back down on the frame. It was a hard pill to swallow. I’d never understood until that night that there were physical limitations that even I had to accept.

I was able to get around in a wheel-chair. It was too painful to walk very far at first. I joined a roving gaggle of amputees and paraplegics who raced about the wards. We were usually stoned or drunk, seeking anyone who might part with a few of this or that to redistribute to ourselves and bed ridden friends back in the ward. I soon was doing wheelies and balancing perfectly with the best of them. I could even negotiate the stairs that way. It was high risk behavior but I didn’t see it that way at all. I was passing time as the end of my enlistment drew nearer. I was allowed to go into town on a day-pass around the first part of July, even though I still wore the cast that covered my torso. I got down to the Jungle in Waikiki and scored pot to bring back to my pals on the ward. A couple of times I went to Hotel Street message parlor where I knew one of the girls that would give me a hand-job for an extra ten bucks. But most of all I simply went to the bars and got good and wasted before coming back to the Hospital at night.

Chapter 2: TRIPPING

It was late August when my cast was cut off and then I transferred to the Medical Holding Company on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. One of the things I’d purchased while convalescing was a Minolta 35 mm SLR. I fancied myself a photographer and, when I wasn’t in bars, took pictures around Waikiki and Honolulu. It was on one of these excursions, celebrating my twenty-third birthday, I met a couple of hippy looking dudes in a bar behind the International Market Place in Waikiki. At the time this area was known for a plethora of drug dealer and muggers. I was drunk and oblivious to this as I talked with the two men in the bar. You guys know where I can score some pot? I asked, knowing full well these two, of all people, would. I knew very little or nothing of what had been going down in the culture at the time. I’d bought the myth about hippies being love, peace, pot, free love and LSD. I was soon to learn otherwise.

Yeh, sure, but we have to go a few miles to get it. Agreed the one whose hair resembled the folk singer Donovan, C’mon, how much do you need? We can get all you want. How much cash do you have on you?

I jumped in the back seat of a four-door, beat-up, Mercury, while Donovan rode shot-gun. The driver was oddly quiet and emitted a sense of ominous foreboding as he drove up out of town into the hills and isolated road where a housing development was under construction. Mr. Ominous stopped the car on the side of the road that had a steep drop of about seventy-five feet above a place where there was nothing but the frames of houses on slabs. It was then that Donovan turned to me with his right hand putting a huge diving knife neatly to my throat. Gimme that goddamned camera and your money! he demanded.

I was in a state of shock… I hadn’t even imagined, let alone seen it coming. I handed over my cash, about forty bucks, and the camera with my left hand flashing a fairly expensive Zodiac diving watch. Gimme your watch too.

Demanding the watch was just a bit too much for me. It wasn’t so much that I held any particular attachment to the watch but I wasn’t about to let this hippy have it all: my camera, my money and my watch! I held out my left hand with the watch as if to surrender it and with my right hand opened the door as Donovan turned to set down the camera on the floorboard. I rolled out, tucked and skied down the loose dirt of the slope to the bottom. I felt my lower back cry out but I didn’t have time to nurse it as I ran for the stacks of lumber set in a maze around one of the houses. Luckily for me, Donovan and Mr. Ominous didn’t bother to give chase on foot. They cruised back and forth on the roads around the development but gave up after a few minutes and sped off.

I made my way back to the base by thumb. It wasn’t hard to hitch a ride in those days. My clothes and face were filthy from rolling down the hill in the dirt and I had no money. Yet the driver; an Air Force First-Lewie, who picked me up, hit-on me regardless. That is always how it is and, any other time, I might have played along for whatever I could con out of the guy otherwise but not this night. I, Max, who was always on the take, was taken this time. I just told the guy I was straight and the subject was dropped. I got back to the barracks and crashed.

There were a few stoners in the medical holding company… mostly section-eights awaiting orders. I was a month or so over the end of my enlistment by this time and I was itching to get back to civilian life. Two of the guys I bunked with had acquired some LSD and asked me if I’d ever done acid before. I was not about to admit that I hadn’t tripped. I only knew enough about acid to want to try it. It sounds pretty lame now but the language people used back then went something like this: Max, we got some acid bro… are you, in the words of Jimi Hendrix, Experienced?

Sure, I lied, I’ve done acid a couple of times. Actually, I’d merely read an interview with Timothy Leary in Playboy but that was enough for me to pose as a big-time tripper.

Good… you wanna trip with us tonight? We’ve never done it before and we’ve been told we ought to have an experienced guide for our first acid trip.

Where you want to trip? I asked, using a tone of confidence and assurance to make them believe they would be in good hands.

We can go to the beach and hang out where there’s some live music if we get bored there. They volunteered.

The evening started out full of promise. I was excited to be able to experience acid but mostly to be able to say I’d done it. I’d lied to my buddies about having dropped LSD because I just didn’t want to admit to anyone that I hadn’t taken it. Once my pals admitted that they had not taken it, I was already committed to the lie and I knew how to lie well enough to stick to my story once I’d told it. I was undaunted by the fact that I was expected to be the guide for the evening simply because I had no idea what a mind altering trip I was in for.

Once on the beach we dropped the orange barrel shaped tabs, passed around a bowl of Panama Red. We then waited for the trip to begin. After about a half hour I began to wonder whether we’d been ripped-off. Someone suggested we go to Kalakaua and hang out in front of one of the open-air clubs with a