Buffalo Boy 2

By Ross G. Drago

Buffalo Boy 2 delivers a young man from Buffalo, New York into the epicenter of the movement that was destined to transform the world, Berkeley, California, 1967, Telegraph Avenue. This collection of short stories, based on actual events that have been carefully eliminated from media history shows us an inside story of what life was like at that time, from a creative viewpoint.
Buffalo Boy 2 moves across time and focuses upon those experiences that deliver stunning spiritual insights, and is both profoundly human and consciousness awakening. Highly emotional at times, the stories are counter-balanced with comedic experiences that will delight the reader with the daring madness of of sixties, such as Jimmy Pump Tart and Escaping Crockett. It is also heart wrenching with When Souls Are Torn Apart. and Funeral for Fran Many of the short stories contained in this book seem destined to re-tell American history, as it really happened, intertwined with the author's own cultural and personal awakening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ross G. Drago
• Release date: Feb 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311529756

Ross G. Drago

Ross G. Drago was born in Buffalo, the son of well known Buffalo artist Ross J. Drago, whose painting of the Buffalo skyline is on the cover of Buffalo Boy. Ross G. Drago is a painter, writer and inventor of an energy symbol language which he uses in his paintings. This language describes human relationships in energy terms. Drago received a B.A. Degree in painting and sculpture at S.U.N.Y. at Elmwood in 1964. Drago moved to Berkeley, California in 1967. There he founded and is Director of the Energy Art Studio. Ross G. Drago is the author of several books on human energy consciousness, and editor of on-line Paint Rag Magazine.

Book preview

Buffalo Boy 2

Ross G. Drago

Buffalo Boy 2

Ross G. Drago

Smashwords Edition

© Ross G. Drago-2014

All rights reserved

An Energy Art Studio Production

Chapter 1: A Buffalonian in Berkeley

A Buffalonian in California waits for winter. Berkeley, as it turned out, did have four seasons, just like Buffalo, but they happened twice a day. Miriam and I and her two daughters, Alana and Cyan, ages sixteen and fourteen, had put Miriam’s car on the same train that we took across Canada, got off at the West Coast of Canada, drove down through Vancouver and Washington into California.

In Berkeley, the rain was never transformed into snow. I had been told that, but deep inside I did not believe it. Year after year I was to wait for that smell of distant snow to manifest itself, and only once, many years later, did it snow a few inches in Berkeley proper.

We took a house on Chabot Road, off College. Nearby was a well known ice cream parlor, small and funky then, with waitresses I could relate to, old and talkative, like Buffalo waitresses. They carried on endless conversations with one another, as though there were no customers, except for an occasional few sentences that ended in honey or sweetheart, as they referred to you, but never focused their eyes on you.

Miriam began to get her degree from CCAC, later to shed its last C, and together we started something called Arts and Industry, trying to get industrial funding for artists. We also began to teach combinations of technology and art, mostly to engineers who came to the bleak basement we rented so that we could teach through Cal Extension.

Miriam was a lover of men. Although this caused me enormous jealousy, since nearly every man who came into her life became a lover, this behavior had a ring of truth to me. In the depths of me, I believed in it. AIDS had not been invented yet, or if it had been it hadn’t been tested on the public to see if it could effectively cleanse the Earth of everyone except white, frigid couples over sixty. As a family, Miriam and her daughters and I came into a small city named Berkeley in the winter of 1967.

In Berkeley, I believed that I had come to a kind of Valhalla for artists. Since everyone had long hair and a beard, I concluded that it was a city filled with artists. Slowly I learned that some of these artists were philosophers. Eventually I met artists who were mathematicians. By the time I pieced together that some of the artists were dentists, the Hip movement was a tidal wave. Inadvertently, since my hair was long and I had a beard, I too was a part of it. The word Hippie was applied to anyone who was not in a suit and tie. I became a part of it, too, because of the introduction of hallucinogenic drugs into my life. I came to Berkeley with the woman I loved, at age twenty-four, and for the first time smoked marijuana, and took a substance called LSD.

I cannot imagine a culture other than the American culture after the Fifties that was more perfectly ripe for the introduction of hallucinogenic drugs. Even as a creative, wild-minded fellow, I was a walking comic strip of unconsciousness, a tape deck that played endless ideas inside my head, never stopping for one second to look out and Behold his own existence as a Miraculous and non-credible Wish Come True. Two alarms went off in my mind. One was LSD, and the second was when Miriam and I were on LSD, and she suddenly had the revelation that everything was energy. Three times she repeated this truth, nothing more was uttered, and I listened to this chant, like the siren in the film 2001 when we touched the monolith of the Moon. Everything is Energy, she said. Everything is Energy! Everything is Energy!

From that moment on, my life, as I wanted it to be, began. This alarm went off and never stopped. With her realization, came my realization. Everything Is Energy! It was for this revelation, that I had left my wife, followed this woman out to California, fought like a salmon to swim upstream to find that place where the mysterious eggs inside my heart and inside my head were to be released. This was what my life was about. This was why, between lifetimes, I did not rest. I was here to sound the horn, among thousands of others, each in our own way, because life as we had always known it was about to be transformed into a much, much, much higher note. Human collective consciousness was about to change.

Chapter 2: Cameras

I found a job at a camera shop on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley half a block from UC Berkeley. Living with Miriam and her daughters on Chabot Road, and then in Berkeley on Josephine Street, the store became a second family to me. I had been made Assistant Manager, and I loved to see people, so the job was natural for me. I sold cameras, took a class in film-making, and got to know the other workers in a familial way.

An employee who was oversized for his position, which was essentially equal to mine, had the tendency to take all things so seriously as to be almost unable to allow words to escape the tightness of his jaw. In a quiet scam, he later became the virtual proprietor of the competition just across the street, so that, in fact, all local photo processing was done by us. When people were upset with our service, we would direct them to take their business across the street. No one complained about the ethics of it, because we were so glad to be away from a man who was, buy nature, always in charge. Now he was across the street.

In the back room of the photo store were saints and angels. Joe T, a Japanese-American, quietly went about the serious business of developing prints. He could always be counted on for sincerity. He was an abyss of sincerity. Although we never spoke, I liked him. Bob was always there with three aspirins when I asked for one. Lynne, the fellow who developed film, loved science fiction as did I, and when he was not developing film, we would sit and talk science fiction ideas. Gladys was lovable, an ex-flapper perhaps, who was like our grandmother knitting in the corner, touching up black-and-white prints with a tiny brush.

The front of the store was where I worked with Carmella, and two Bobs, and others who came and went. It was Carmella that I became closest friends with. She studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. We talked endlessly about art and about architecture, and filmmaking.

It was in my second year of working there that the door swung open one day and a young woman walked in to apply for a job. She wore a deep green dress; she was tall, with blue eyes and thick, long brown hair. I was standing behind the cash register when she first pushed open the door. When I saw her for the first time, I sucked in my breath, and the thought went through me like a bullet, "What are you doing here now?"

Indeed, as time would deliver, the woman in the green dress came into my life at the wrong time. I was still with Miriam. In the year that we worked together after she was hired, although we stood beside one another behind the same counter, we did not speak one word to one another. Only once did she ask me for advice on how to build an environmental art piece that involved digging a trench six feet deep and twenty feet long. I suggested an industrial vacuum cleaner, which she seemed to approve of.

So a small seed was planted whose genetic structure had built into it no need whatsoever for logic or reason, but was perfectly comfortable in the land of doing that which had never been done before in a way that had never been thought of either. This giant sequoia seed of future possibilities was to silently sink roots into the earth of Berkeley even as I lived with Miriam, and for the year and a half that I went to live in the desert after Miriam and I were to split up, still it was growing..

She was to wear her green dress every day for the next year of my knowing her. She was as soft of voice as the Pacific Ocean, and she, too, was like the Ocean incarnate. In this mysterious way, I recognized that two scenes from my life were spliced into one another prematurely. I was devoted to Miriam, yet Marie walked through the doorway. It shocked me, because some part of me could see the future, know that she and I were to be together for ten years, twenty-four hours a day, in a relationship so bizarre and wonderful, that it must have made waves back to the past that washed over my memory. Our names were destined to become as a single word to everyone we would come to know.

Three years ahead in time, after breaking up with Miriam and almost two years in San Bernardino, I would return to Berkeley with a young woman named Beatrice, and this would begin a series of events that I was never able to justify to myself. I had started out in my life as a nice Catholic boy, fully intending to live up to all of the good things expected. But as life took me by increasing surprise, I made increasing numbers of decisions that were not fitting into the template of my own idea of what was good or right.

Beatrice and I had borrowed money from her sister, who lived down south. We took a floor in a three-story apartment house on Ocean View Drive near Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. Beatrice and I took our room together.

There were other rooms to rent so that we could pay the balance due. In walking down University Avenue, I spotted Marie’s old clown car driving up the street and I waved my hands to catch her eye. She pulled over, recognized me, and as we talked, it came out that she was looking for a place to live. I told her about our place and how there was a room for rent. We went to see it, and she took the room.

In a week’s time, it became clear to me that Beatrice was a wonderful young woman, but that Marie was my destiny. It became obvious to myself and both of them. It all came up in discussion. I wanted to soft-pedal and just have a more casual, non-intimate relationship with both, to figure things out. But it was brought to a head. They each had to know where I stood. In that moment, sitting with both of them at the kitchen table, I had to choose one or the other. I had no choice. I had only to go through the eye of the needle and come out alive.

I spoke the words, I choose Marie. I then moved my things out of Beatrice’s room and into Marie’s, and there we remained, Beatrice living just next door in the same house, crushed by the events of her first few weeks in Berkeley.

Within a month, Beatrice took up with the very kind and good young man who lived upstairs. We were busy, all of us, now, hauling wooden boxes of earth onto the roof of the apartment building in order to create a roof garden to grow vegetables in the only sun we had.

He had reason to hate me. But he was always civilized and polite. I played the part of villain without flinching, but in my heart I knew I had no choice. I should not have moved in with a woman I was not devoted to, for the second time, the first being with my ex-wife.

After Marie and I had moved to our own place several blocks away, Beatrice moved in with Dave, upstairs, became pregnant and they stayed together. In this way, there was a destiny about it for her as well. It came to me, many years later, that destiny has a positive and a negative aspect. Both, of course, are indistinguishable as the full wave unfolds itself, but in the moment of happening, destiny seems to have a negative and positive side for everyone concerned. I played out the villain and she was the victim. Yet time showed that both of us were leaves in a wind greater than either of us could begin to see. The child she had was to grow up, and it would all be clear to her one day that that was the child she was supposed to have. I knew from the first instant I saw Marie, that she was destined to be with me.

As one who was raised as a devout member of the Catholic Church for the first sixteen years of my life, I had taken on the struggle of defeating shame and guilt. These two forces come with Catholicism; it is a package deal.

It was this set of forces that I was to take on in relation to myself, as a way of escaping the immense suffering that guilt can cause. I vowed to myself that one day I