Being Our Own Gods; Drug Memoirs of an Artist, 1970: 75

By Gary D Aker

70s drug culture meets The Fool, out on the highway, coast-to-coast, Canada, and the Caribbean, the anti-hero rides his rocket thumb through all the drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll he can get his grubby hands on.
Eric, aged 18 to 23, neither shies away from nor becomes defined by the organic needs of the times.
The book is non-linear, composed of 24 story / chapters divided into four geographical sections that piece together to form a mosaic whole. The stories range in length from 1300 words to 8000 words. The reader can potentially choose to begin with any story, in any section: Coast-to-Coast and Canada, Jamaica, Florida, and Boulder. Or they can simply read in a linear fashion.
This is a non-violent book with graphic, mostly psychedelic drug-use and sexual content.
There is one death in the entire book.
The gritty tales told do not shy away from any content.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gary D Aker
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005466701

Gary D Aker

Gary Aker lives in Portland, Or, where he pursues dance and photography, as well as his usual and unusual writing duties. He has published two novels, "Delusion" and "North Of Likely," which comprise a two-part series.His great uncle, on his mother's side--by marriage, not by blood--is in baseball's Hall of Fame. His mother was an ER nurse and community theater actress. His father was a nuclear submarine design engineer. Born in Chicago, reared in Pittsburgh, he is proud to have dropped out of both Penn State and the University of Colorado in Boulder.He has published poetry in myriad literary reviews, most recently in, "Eternal Haunted Summer," spring and summer issues. He has published short erotic stories and an excerpt of his first novel, "Delusion," in, "Gallery Magazine."Three of the characters in, "Delusion," are prominent in his second novel, "North of Likely." It is not a traditional sequel, as the hero of the first, "Delusion," is not present in, "North of Likely," but is only mentioned off page. The hero of, "North of Likely," is a supporting character in, "Delusion." Paul Steiner and Alicia Mannion are prominent in both novels. One could say the two part series tells the 165,000 word story of Secret Service agent, Bob Taggart, who evolves into the criminal, John Taylor, before realizing his fateful end, following the parameters of the Hero's Journey."North of Likely" was developed through a writer's workshop, as well as his first crime novel, "Delusion."He is currently working on a semi- autobiographical work of fiction, in the spirit of Jerzy Kosinski's, "Steps," whereby the chapters are virtually stand alone, and are not presented in chronological order, but form a mosaic whole.He is also crafting his third crime novel, "The Black Pearl Necklace," starring, James Whitecarol--the junky, dumpster-diving, defective detective who lives in his office in San Francisco's Tenderloin. An excerpt from the novel-in-process appeared in, "The Alberta Street Review," Volume Two. The novel features a very unusual character who shares narration: a priceless, 18th century necklace strung from uncultured black pearls and round, gem-cut diamonds. The mysterious, one-of-a-kind, inanimate object lends the sardonic, transcendent, omnicient view of things, in succinct spacer chapters, strung into the novel like the diamonds in between the raw black pearls.Mr. Aker has been: a juice bar/luncheonette owner, fine dining and private club waiter, onstage musician/vocalist, onstage dancer, actor's theater house and facility manager, adult magazine editor, blackjack dealer, cab driver, cook and countless other incarnations.Mr. Aker has penned the following types of work for real cash money: advertising, both display and radio ads, public relations and brochures for profit and non-profit companies, numerology charts, actor and band bios, poetry, short stories, hundreds of articles on the following subject matter--band and music event reviews/previews, movie reviews, theater reviews, restaurant reviews, interviews, columnist social satire, political satire, absurdist humor, and investigative to name some over the years. When he writes a novel, he brings all of the above, living and writing experience, to his work, plus his childhood writing dreams hatched by his mother who was an avid fan of the crime novel and mystery/suspense.One of his best friends, and bigger heart throbs from the 90s, was B-movie actress, Gabriella Hall, AKA, Laura Saldivar. She is his mind's eye model for the female protagonist of the same first name in, "The Black Pearl Necklace."You may contact Mr. Aker: [e-mail]

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue: Room For All at the Table

COAST TO COAST AND CANADA

1.   The Art of Driving The Bus

2.   Shattered

3.   The Kundalini Way of the Three Sisters

4.   Way Out West, Man

5.   No More Free Love

6.   Porn Imitates Life

7.   Soul Highway Interchange

JAMAICA

8.   Blue Boy

9.   Lime and Cane

10.   Underbelly

11.   The Queen of East Street

12.   Green Banana Cure

13.   British Breakfast

FLORIDA

14.   The Other Side of Ocean Boulevard

15.   Down in Daytona

16.   Picture Postcard World

17.   The Great and The Small

BOULDER

18.   Jana-Lee, Queen of the STP

19.   Mother Made Me

20.   Crazy Mary from Texas

21.   What Was Your Name?

22.   Early Bird Granola versus the Amanita Muscaria

23.   The Great Vagina Showdown of 1975

24.   Ward of the State

Epilogue: Owsley Made Me Do It

Appendix: Organic Pharmacopeia

About the Author

PROLOGUE

Room For All at the Table

(May, 1970)

Mom could scatter more words to the wind than a Pirate’s Parrot on mushrooms—a million cajillion words per hour. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 WPH.

Not only would I try to keep up, I was the only one struggling to hear.

And here is her message, completely decoded from the crazy talk, the one that I deciphered over and over: We all need to get along. We all need to love each other . . . and have dinner together each and every Thanksgiving. Make room. Make a place for everyone at the table. Be sure to use the old Norwegian stuffing recipe for the bird handed down from my mother and grandmother, using tiny smoked oysters, and make real giblet gravy from scratch. Baste that damn bird every fifteen minutes so it doesn’t dry out!

Okay. That’s it.

Substitute non-meat options if you’re vegetarian. But make sure it’s Scandinavian.

Irish people are permitted at the table, so long as they wash their hands first and are not drunk! For Irish, you can substitute Appalachian white trash, or anyone who is downtrodden. Kids sit at the kids’ table—a folding card table with wobbly bent metal legs guaranteed to produce spillage! Spankings. Yellings. Food fights.

And, Mom, he’s putting mashed potatoes up inside his nose again!

Every good story, or great novel, starts out crazy, gets even crazier, and somehow works it out in the end. Mom was like that. She was definitely not crazy in the end.

When I was seventeen, spring of 1970, mom made the routine trip across the street to the rental office for the rows of red brick, two story tenements where we resided. Except this time she forgot to wear any clothes. I had just seen her running around the apartment in her leopard face, clingy nylon dress that made her look like a deranged nightclub siren. Apparently, she thought that dress was just too loud and didn’t have anything else to wear.

I had gone into my room and closed the door, on what was otherwise a routine Saturday afternoon. Later on, after I got the call, I could easily imagine her bursting through the front screen door without a stitch, naked as a jaybird with bright red hair and face made up a bit theatrical . . . to give them the news . . . in a non-stop, theater-voice monologue drawn down from the stars, if you could actually see them fighting through the heavy smog in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, way back in the early 70s.

There she is, ripping through the office front door like she’s making her entrance in one of the myriad amateur plays she starred in.

I’m Beatrice!

I’ll say!

"My son and I have lived across the street now for three years. My daughters are both in college. One’s going to be a teacher and the oldest is going to be an actress! She goes to the Pittsburgh Playhouse, run by Carnegie Mellon. I work as a nurse full time—ER at St Clair Memorial Hospital in Mount Lebanon. My son’s going to be an astronomer. He has a telescope my father gave him for his sixteenth birthday. But my father died last winter. Heart attack, his fourth one! My son’s also a photographer and he dances around the apartment all day in his skivvies. So, we need a bigger place. You see. Not too big. Just a bigger living room, really. And that kitchen! is the size of a potholder.

"No, dad’s not coming. And you, Don, answer the phone! He’s in a halfway house for alcoholics. He doesn’t know about Wally and me. In fact, Wally’s wife doesn’t know about Wally and me. My son has a beautiful girlfriend with green eyes and freckles. I think she’s Scottish. They’re going away to college together. Penn State University. I never went to college, but I graduated from Nursing School at Ravenswood Hospital in Chicago, same hospital where all three of my kids were born! You see!

"So after he goes to college, it will just be me. I don’t know what I’ll do by myself with everyone gone. Maybe I don’t need more space, after all. Did you know I starred in Bus Stop! I played the Norma Jean character. I understand her. She’s a Gemini, too. Her pain. Now that everyone’s dead—John, Bobby, Dr. King . . . .

I’ve always told my three children, there is no color. Working as an ER nurse, you see everyone under the rainbow, like Judy sang. And you see a lot of what’s on the inside. Blood. Red. Everyone bleeds red, bleeds the same. And we have the same laugh, same tears, all the same bones. Our similarities make up most of what we are. Our parts and pieces are all the same on the inside. Our hopes and dreams, losses and tragedies, it’s all the same. Shared. We just each do it in our special way.

Well, by now the police had arrived. They came and summoned me, too. I brought her leopard print dress over to the office, some flats, and a jacket.

Mom knew it was time to go. I guess I gotta go bounce down to the booby hatch now for awhile.

Yes, Bea, officer said.

Don’t I know you? her blue eyes blazed.

I don’t know, he lied, teasing her.

I’m sure I’ve seen you at the St. Clair ER.

Oh, right. I didn’t recognize you . . . out of your uniform.

Well, here I am! challenging authority.

Just slip your dress on, Bea. We’ll go sort this out.

Mom was always a little reluctant to leave Crazyland. Who could blame her. They didn’t really have it figured out back then, like they do now. She had been strapped down, tight restraints, electro-shock therapy, and loaded up to her eyeballs on thorazine many times before. But she liked art therapy. She usually came home with some souvenir from the booby hatch that she had made.

In the cop car, the officer, my mother, and I all sat together in the back seat. Mom in the middle, of course. She continued to talk non-stop about everything under the sun, vacillating between happy, then too happy, sad, then too sad, mad, punching-my-arm mad, yelling mad, crying, laughing . . . and anything else a human being can feel, all coming out completely unedited. There are no editors, monitors, or censors in Crazyland.

I think part of what crazy might be is a soul constriction—as if your spirit is literally too big for its body, this world, or society and all its constraints. All the same on the inside, but some are a wee bit bigger, so our innermost self is fighting to get out. Get some daylight! Run around. Naked as a jaybird. Free!

You don’t have to be crazy to be free. But, on the other hand, if you don’t even know how to be crazy, I don’t think you can ever really know freedom.

It’s not for everyone. It’s for those willing to fight and scratch and claw their way out . . . and take their seat at the grand table with the whole fam damily.

So we begin . . .

COAST TO COAST

AND CANADA

CHAPTER 1

The Art of

Driving The Bus

ZZ Top was all he would play, high on speed, driving the Green Tortoise straight through the night, all the way from Portland to San Francisco, in the spring of ‘79. Tres Hombres . Somewhere outside Sacramento, on I-80, he called out to the dozen or so passengers, lounging around in the back. We could smoke cig’s, but no weed and no alcohol, in case the pigs pulled us over. But speed and acid were okay!

"Hey. I’m about to crash. Coming down hard. Can’t make it to San Francisco. Can someone come up here and drive this thing?!’’

We looked around at each other with mild shock and certain disbelief. Not a word.

Like, now would be good! he shouted.

Still not a peep out of the miscreants hoping to make San Francisco by mid morning.

If no one can take over, I’m gonna have to pull over. Shoulder here’s no good for a bus this size.

Shit, and we had been making such great time. Only ten hours into the trip, which started out about 9 p.m., from Heavy Number Taco up in Northwest Portland, yesterday.

Seriously, I got to pull it over now. We could cause an accident. There’s not enough room to get off . . .

I’ll do it! What did I say that for?

You? he said, whipping his neck around to give me a one eye pirate glare.

Yeah. Me.

Well, get on up here then.

I scurried up the aisle to the driver’s seat. You’re gonna pull it over first, right?

"No, kid, that’s the whole point. There’s no room, and I have to crash for two hours, or we will."

What are you talking about then!

Look, it’s easy. I’ve done this plenty times before, just not with any of you, eyeing his new driver with suspicion.

Huh? What did I get myself into.

Relax. You come under, and you’re skinny, so no problem, and I go over, while holding the wheel.

What about—

Before I could protest, he was up out of the chair, and our speed was diving down, as his foot left the accelerator.

Get in there! he barked like a salty captain.

I slid under his arm, as he looked out and guided the steering.

Find the accelerator, he commanded from above, as I settled my skinny bones into the well worn seat.

I did and slowly pressed down. Shit, the speed was gliding back up, as I felt the power of the 1958 Coachman come under my foot.

Yeah, now take the steering, cause I can’t stand here and drive with one hand.

I seized the wheel, like taking the helm of a mighty ship, clutching her at nine and three. Palms up to heaven.

NO. Not so tight. Your hands are turnin’ white?! Ease up. Hold it like a lover.

I loosened my grip.

There. Don’t squeeze it. Feel it? The pirate captain said.

I started to intuit the gentle swim of the Green Tortoise, the cadence and rhythm of six wheels turning down the highway.

Check your speed.

Sixty-five, I observed.

I want you to bring that down a bit. Sixty is tops for you.

I did as he commanded, while the steering came more under my control, and less under his.

"Are you ready?

I think so . . .

I’m letting go. . . . And you’re driving a bus!

Whoa. Wait. What? How do I stop it?

Brake is right there to your left, he said with considerable irritation, about to head to the beds in the back and collapse.

But I don’t think I can downshift.

Don’t worry. It’s not like a car. Just slow it down. Pull it over if you have to, or if it looks like we’re about to come into San Francisco and you don’t know where to turn off… just pull it over. Stop. Put the clutch in. Try to find neutral. Fuck. Man! I got to sleep now! Don’t sweat it!

The other passengers had watched helplessly as this unfolded. Their fate was now in my hands—the kid, from the back of the bus. A guy, who looked like he should be the one driving, came up to the front to keep an eye out for himself and the rest . . . and on me.

Okay. That’s it. You got it. Doing great, he repeated a mantra of encouragement like a traveler’s talisman to keep the big gray Coachman—more like a floating hippie caravan—on the road. This was no school bus, short bus, Winnebago affair. This was a full-sized 1950s passenger bus bought from the old Continental Trailways busline when they were going out of business.

I just need to crash. Hard. Two hours if you can do it, driver yelled from the floating mound of beds, harem-sized, at the back of the bus.

Will do! I yelled back, confidence creeping into my forearms, steering her onto glory down I-80 west.

Out of my mind I was. This was better than drugs. This was a pure speed adrenaline bus rush.

Just keep her steady between those white lines of freedom, boy, I coached myself. Straight shot, mostly, from Sacramento to San Francisco. What could go wrong? I can do this. I was made to do this. What, me worry? I had survived the great Greyhound bus accident in the blizzard of ‘73. Guy next to me died. This was nothing. I would keep us all safe and alive. I was the right man for this job.

Okay, the guy continued with his safe-driving mantra. Hold her gentle. Don’t over steer, or over correct. Momentum alone will keep it going straight down the road. Let it drive itself. Like it has been for the last twenty years. This is just one more little piece of road. Doesn’t matter to the bus who drives it. Respect the bus. He went on like this.

Everyone on the bus, who was sleeping, or talking, or otherwise engaged, now had their eyes glued on me. Breathless. You could hear a joint drop back there.

I reveled in it. Hey, it’s okay to talk back there, keep doing what you’re doing.

Have mercy!, been waitin’ for the bus all day . . .

Hell yes. Play that ZZ Top. Chop wood. Carry water. Drive that fool bus into the heart of Frisco.

I started rocking in the driver’s seat, like my body was propelling its tonnage down the road. I was the engine. I was the bus.

I am busman.

That’s it. You’re doing it. No worries, little brother, co-pilot said.

In a jumpin’ jack flash, I was hurled back to the way it was in the early 70s—being our own gods, casting every caution to the wind. On a long open highway, we said no to anyone trying to tell us what to do. And yes to this legendary feeling.

CHAPTER 2

Shattered

Iwouldn’t have been the first freshman to jump to his death from the newly minted East Towers at Penn State. Seventh floor, I was high enough up in the air. Splat. Not today. In the spring of 1971, I had to let go of the illusion of friends, family, country, and collegiate career, when everyone got up and left right after my dad died.

Mom had bounced down to the booby hatch again, about two days after his funeral, sadly attended by only his ex-wife and three children. Meanwhile, back at Penn State, my girlfriend decided this would be a good time to start balling my best friend, who lived down the hall from me.

Despite all that, suicide is ultimately a violent narcissistic act about hurting others. I wasn’t mad at my dad. I’m sure he didn’t plan on dying of a sudden heart attack at 48. Mom? She had acute mental illness the last six years, and had been hospitalized for manic episodes at least once a year since I had turned twelve.

Jenna, my girlfriend since I turned sixteen, who ran away to Penn State just to be with me, though she could have written her own ticket with her brains and her parents’ money . . . hell no. Free love, baby. Love the one you’re with. And I was no fun, lost in my own teenage wasteland. Donnie? My best friend? Who looked like Robert Plant . . . how could he resist her—smart, funny, green eyes, freckles, and literally, 36-24-36.

I wasn’t nearly mad enough at anyone, especially me, to go suicidal on them. It was just enough to consider it, each and every damn day. You see, life is a choice, my choice, not anyone else’s choice. Only by considering my power to end it, with a leap to the courtyard below, or a handful of infirmary-prescribed Seconal, could I find the real power I had in that choice . . . .

Alright. I’ll live today. Dad’s dead. Mom’s nuts. Girlfriend’s banging on the door with my best friend, and I’m flunking all the way out. But I will not give my hillbilly roommate, Kyle, who’s majoring in Animal Husbandry, the satisfaction of saying to his hillbilly friends, Damn pot-smoking hippies. See what you get. Drugs will kill you.

No. You idiot sideways hillbilly fuck. Drugs saved my sorry life. And yours. Without them I would have killed you and then myself. And found an imaginative way to do it. PCP, animal tranquilizers, comes to mind.

So, I did what the infirmary doctor ordered. Why not get out of yourself. Maybe take a little trip over the weekend.

I took acid as it was originally prescribed . . . for depression!

Found a friend, i.e., someone who I got high with, and who assisted me in buying and selling my drugs—those rare times I had more drugs than I could safely consume. So, why not sell some of the drugs I had so I could buy other, better, different drugs?

Other, better, different drugs became my new motto after dear dad died. And wherever those drugs took me to, or whatever I needed to do to survive taking those drugs, or to obtain more drugs.

I dropped. Dosed. Tripped. And it wasn’t the first time. Although definitely the only time I traded Seconal for acid. Wasn’t the most profound trip I had ever been on, before or since.

Shattered.jpg

Eric Trying to decide,

Photo: Ed Krebs

My acid tripping friend was another hillbilly from West Virginia. Except he liked to do drugs. He had bad teeth, from hillbilly dentists, and a cratered complexion, from a hillbilly diet—pheasant and Kool-aid. In spite of all that, he always looked like his thin, shiny, straight brown hair had just been washed. He would constantly run his dirty fingers through his hair, and pull it back from his face when we were high—which was all the time.

I do not recall attending any classes, Spring Term, 1971. And yet I maintained a 2.0 average. How did I do that? Behold the miracle of drugs, son.

Dad’s dead. Mom’s crazy. Girlfriend’s banging your best friend. What are you going to do about it? Drugs. That’s what you’re going to do about it.

So, around the time we were peaking on this particular Window Pane, we wandered over to the Quad cafeteria. Not because we were hungry. Oh god no. We had found a way to mount our little consciousness boards, and surf the wave we were on . . . all the way into shore.

It was safe to go out. Be around others. Observe their habits in their native habitat. This was a favorite pastime. I played the professorial cultural anthropologist, while he was my assistant.

Ralph, what do we see over there? I always called him, Ralph, when we were high . . . which was all the time. And I cannot remember his real name because of it. Oh well.

We see a mating ritual, Ralph said.

Exactly, I concurred. The male of the species, in his brightly flowing tie-dyed shirt, is flashing his white teeth, showing off his sturdy jaw line . . . good for tearing and masticating meat.

Strong neck. Good bone structure, Ralph added.

He’s pimping out his gene pool, and releasing their pheromones.

Their what? Ralph tried to keep a straight face and stay in character.

That West Virginie boy was the best goddam drug assistant an almost-suicidal-freshman could ever have. They’re giving off their scent to each other, I explained to my dear, Ralph. Primates always do this before mating as a sign . . . of their desire to mate . . .

Must carry on the species, Ralph, who I suspected was still a virgin, but I never asked, suddenly charged in.

Yes. Releasing their pheromones as their complex, coded DNA message to each other, describing the attributes of their gene pool.

I actually had taken a course in Cultural Anthropology, and read, The Naked Ape. So, I was obviously well-versed in my part. Ralph, on the other hand, was just a naturally gifted actor when he was high—which was all the time. I fed him my lines like he was a starving lion at the zoo. That was all he needed for his part to unfold, and virtually write itself.

As we bantered on, tripping balls like no tomorrow, we didn’t notice how our observed, mating ritual couple’s conversation was heating up. Right about the time of our absolute peak, she rose up from their table, picked up her full glass of water—yes, cafeterias had water glasses made of glass, not plastic or paper way back then—and threw it with the arm of a major league pitcher.

As the glass shattered against the wall, at least thirty feet away, where thankfully, no one—especially our balls-out-tripping-asses—was sitting, every sound in the cafeteria stopped on the thinnest membrane . . . between worlds. Life before she rose up and threw her full water glass against the wall, and life thereafter. She simply stood there and watched, as we all stared with her, and observed the water bleed, like Salvador Dali’s clock, down the landscape of the institutional tiled green wall, creating in its magical wake a primordial silence.

I turned to Ralph. Since we were tripping our balls off, neither one of us could be sure if we had just seen what we thought we had seen. His pupils, like the giant black saucers of some alien insect, confirmed it. What had been seen cannot be unseen.

And as this deafening silence enveloped us all, and she continued to stand there admiring her work, I turned once more to my faithful assistant. And so we arrive at the primordial silence of early man, I said in a voice that sounded just like an educational film narrator.

Ralph couldn’t hold it in a second longer and burst out laughing.

Then I started howling.

Now all eyes were on us. Surely everyone now knew we were tripping, and would call the campus police. We ran for the exit, ran for our tripping lives, laughing so hard, we were double bonus pinballs bouncing off metal-framed chairs like 100 point bumpers, and Formica tables screaming a thousand points each, all lit up like the Fourth of July, careening through the cafeteria in the most hysterical, tripping balls zigzag line. Outside, we clutched our sides. We would have easily puked out laughter, if there was anything other than cheap cafeteria Cokes in our heaving stomachs.

As soon as we settled down some, we ran, half laughing, half stumbling, over to his room at the older, more stately dorms.

Ralph’s drugs saved my life. I began to slowly knit myself back together after that fateful day of, She Who Must Be Obeyed threw her water glass against the wall.

And everything that had once mattered shattered. For good.

Much later, after midnight, and we had sparked enough bowls to stone an elephant, I wandered back to my dorm room. There was a pay phone in the hall. No personal phones of any kind, we left notes saying who had called on each other’s doors.

On my door there was a new note. I ripped it free of the push-pin. Unfolded it. Death called.

Nice try. Yeah. Right. If I was still tripping balls, I might have gone off on a death trip. But I was coming down free and easy off that high Window Pane. Besides, I knew what it meant. My girlfriend, Jenna, though she got off like an astronaut, was sometimes more than a little dry, and very tight. There was simply no such thing as lube back then, so, I just greased that big nasty pole with a couple fingers-full of Vaseline. I kept the jar handy, next to my bed, on account of the fact I was fucking her all the damn time.

And so she came by the nickname, Death Valley, also a tribute to a popular Western called, Death Valley Days.

Death Valley now shortened to, Death, I laughed to myself, shoving the note down into my dirty jeans’ pocket. Yup, in a way, tripping out on acid that whole Saturday, I felt like I had cheated death, and cheated on, Death Valley.

Kyle was sawing wood as I fell into my bed with my clothes on. I loved her madly, my little, Death Valley. Even though she was screwing my best friend, and her art teacher. Got an A! No matter.

I can’t quit you babe, so I’m gonna put you down for awhile . . . Robert sang.

A bold plan rose out of the ashes. I would move. Run far away. It was the only way to let go of her, my dead Dad, my wonderful, but crazy mom.

Move way out west. First in my family to live west of the Mississippi. That’s how I would get back at all of them for abandoning me. I’d leave them, geographically speaking, far, far behind.

And be closer to the source . . . .

me_truckin.jpg

Photo: Ed Krebs

CHAPTER 3

The Kundalini Way

of the Three Sisters

The three sisters lived in a little gingerbread cottage in State College, where I stayed after I dropped out in the spring of ‘72. I had lost my room at the Koinonia house owing to my non-student status, leaving academia around the first anniversary of my Dad’s death in March. The three sisters weren’t kin, more like close cousins of a sort. Annabelle, the youngest of the three, and openly bi-sexual, had a double room; she gave me her front room with a bare mattress on the floor and nothing else. I kicked down some scratch from my Social Security survivor’s benefit.

The house was small but not cramped, and full of good old fashioned love