Trailer Park Hippie II: Hippies On The Hump

Dear Reader: This book is a work of fiction. Please be aware of the adult content herein. There are descriptions of illegal drug use and consensual s*x (sometimes involving under-age characters). These pages also contain racist and divisive language, but the characters using such language are portrayed as the bad guys, not the good. No offense to minorities or people of color is intended. Peace--BC   ONE: 1777 COAL STREET/EAST MORTON, OHIO/CHRISTMAS EVE, 1969            It was Christmastime on The Hump, Reader. With turkey (or ground hog) devoured, patchwork quilts and fishing lures exchanged, dishes done (or broken over the heads of drunken relatives), and small children tucked into featherbeds hand sewn in the motherland, Hump dwellers who had not gone “down home” for the holidays were doing what they did on most of their days or nights off work. Some were playing five-point pitch at their kitchen tables. Others sat out on kerosene-heated porches with sheets of plastic nailed up for the winter. Most were enjoying ice-cold bottles of Hudepohl beer between sips of pure Kentucky moonshine from the passing Mason jar. This time-honored beverage combo was just the Yuletide libation to complement the “North Pole Showdown” edition of BIG TIME WRESTLING (pronounced locally as “Rasslin’”) on the portable black-and-white TV. When Rudy the Raunchy Reindeer charged through the ropes to lock horns with Satanic Santa, even the humblest Humpster was transformed into an astute (if not completely sober) sports analyst:               “‘At shore as hail IS a real sport now, Junior. Don’t you let nobody tell you it ain’t. When a two-hunnert-fitty-pound man th’ows yer ace outen ‘at rang onto hard concrete, son? They ain’t no fake TO it!”               Just as we envisioned our neighbors engaged in their favorite pastimes that Christmas Eve, we at 1777 Coal Street were engaged in our own, celebrating the festive season by sitting around the Christmas tree and listening to loud music. I had put up and decorated the tree with help from the Robust Boy, who did not actually live with us on Coal Street. He still had his room in his parents’ home but spent plenty of time at ours and even helped us with household stuff, bringing over his mother’s vacuum cleaner to sweep our shocking turquoise carpet for special occasions.               Robust’s nickname had been bequeathed him by his bachelor uncle, Luther, because Robust Jr. (the nephew), like Robust Sr. (the uncle), had been hefty from childhood. By the time he reached old age and passed his nom de guerre on to his brother’s son, Luther required two kitchen chairs on which to sit and enjoy the legendary “hog bastes” that Robust’s family threw on holidays.               As cool, hip, and above it all as we were the rest of the year, Robust and I shared an old-fashioned love of Christmas that our freaky, anti-Establishment friends found a bit too middle class, so we had gone by ourselves that winter to cut down a Frasier fir at the Alpine Tree Farm on the way to Middleville. Then Robust had stolen us some of his mother’s old lights and ornaments with which to decorate.               A traditionally appointed Christmas tree was probably the last thing you would have expected to see in the living room of our sordid hippie home, but it (the tree, not the home) looked good that year, as I recall. Gracing its top branch, in lieu of the standard star or angel, was a large, silver peace-symbol ornament we had fashioned from my last scraps of aluminum foil to put our freaky signature on the holiday.               Around our tree we all sat, the four official resident-hosts of 1777 Coal St. and a few of our regular guests, in the dim ambience created by the muted tree lights. We were passing a joint of our own Christmas cheer and getting high--all except for housemate Bony, who was striding room-to-room as usual, flying on his brown-and-white diet pills and flipping his electric yo-yo up and down its string, refusing to smoke anything but Kools because grass would interfere with his speed buzz.               No, Reader, the seasonal sounds of “Deck the Halls” and “Silent Night” did not fill the house. We were not quite that traditional. We still had to differentiate ourselves musically from the uncool masses. In fact, we had just put on Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey album when--               BANG: The living room window exploded in a shower of glass, and a big, paper-covered rock thumped down on our hideous carpet.               “Far out!” and “Heavy, man!” were the cannabis-mellowed responses from most of us, but housemate JT’s guest Faith (who preferred to be called “Peaceful”) was sitting closest to the window and got a little freaked out when the rock landed on the floor beside her, abruptly invading her peaceful personal space.               “Like . . . f*****g . . . wow,” Faith stage-whispered. Staring at the paper-covered stone lying amid fragments of glass on the ugly rug, she hit the joint in her hand hard and long and held onto it in case she should require another hit to deal with this crisis. “I’m getting, like . . . a vibe of violence,” she announced in a croak from the smoky bottom of her throat. “It’s, like . . . your redneck neighbors.” She inhaled another hit and squinted through the smoke to tune in on this vibe she was describing. “It’s like we’ve forgotten, you know, like . . . where we really . . . are?” She waved the joint around to indicate the walls of the house. “You know, we’re all, like, so cool together . . . and love each other so much here inside this space that we’ve forgotten we’re, like . . . on the f*****g HUMP!” Faith choked and coughed out the last four words of this profound observation. “Oooh, wowww!” She shook her head slowly, assumed a countenance expressive of deep inner suffering, and hit the joint once more. “Oh, God!” she whimpered, gazing tragically at each of us in turn as the tiny shards of glass in her long, straight, center-parted red hair glinted with the colors of the Christmas tree lights. “I’m getting, like, a vibe of death!” she began to whine. “Like the Humpsters want to kill us!” Her face contorted, she was now on the verge of tears. “Oh, Bummer! I don’t wanna die on The Huuump!”               “I can dig that, Faithful,” I said, extending my hand toward her. “Neither do I, but why don’t you pass that joint this way just in case, so we can both die high and loving each other here inside this beautiful space together?”               “I’m Peeeaceful, not Faithful!” Her whining continued while the joint burned on between her many-ringed fingers. “My straight name is Faith, but I’ve taken the name ‘Peaceful’ because I feel my parents misread my aura when I was borrrnn.” She exhaled smoke as she spoke and hit the joint yet again.               “I’m hip to all that, my sister,” I said, “but your aura is smoky, and mine is not, so why don’t you, like, pass me that joint and go comb the glass out of your hair?”               “In my hair! There’s glass in my hair?” Faith squealed, her free hand flying to her head, where she raked her fingers down and cut herself on the first splinter of glass she touched. “Oh, God, I’m bleeding!” Now she started to cry. “This is so violent! I think I’m going to freeeak!” The joint flew back up to her grimacing mouth. By the time I wrenched it away from her, she had sucked it down another half-inch.               “Be cool, Peace-Faith.” I slid my big magenta-pink comb out of the fringed buckskin pouch that hung from my three-inch-wide, black leather belt, which held my ass-patched, skin-tight, bell-bottom blue jeans to my hipbones. (My high-school girlfriend, Tonya, had made the pouch for me in our senior year, before she’d found out about Storm.) I put the comb in Faith’s lap as I took the joint from her hand. “Trade you,” I said.                “Peaceful!” Faith sniffled and stared at her bloody finger. “I’m going to freak.” She shook her head once more in resignation. “I know I am.”               “You can’t freak out on grass, Faith,” I assured her, though I had once feared I would do exactly that, myself, the first time I got off smoking dope with Storm back in high school. (She had had opium-treated weed rolled on a roller into joints the size of big, fat Camels. After we had smoked three of them as fast as we could, I spent the rest of the night looking for someplace to hide from the spontaneous psychedelic delusions that took up residence in my paranoid brain. I swore off pot the following day and didn’t touch it for months thereafter.)               “Nooo!” Faith whined. “I did acid, like half a hit of Purple Microdot.” She bowed her head as she delivered this confession. “A guy picked me up thumbing over here. He said he was in the Lemon Pipers or something. Oh God! I know I’m going to freak!”               “What’d he look like?”               “I don’t knoooww,” Faith continued to whine. “Like a guy in a baaand, I guess. Oh, Gaaawd, I’m freaking!”               Yes, entertaining could be demanding, stressful work at 1777 Coal Street, Reader. I looked to JT for some assistance with freaked-out Faith since he was the one who would be balling her at dawn, but he just shook his head, both at his guest and in rhythm to Van Morrison.               “Then how about freaking in the bathroom?” I said. “That’s the best place for it. Bo will help you. He’s done it many times. Bo, take Freakful--”               “Peeeaceful!”               “--to the bathroom and fix her finger or help her comb her hair or . . . something,” by which I meant anything that would spare us another minute of her insufferable whining.               I could see housemate Bo, as he hit the diminishing joint himself, eyeing our emotional guest to gauge how high she really was and how much of her trauma was drama--exactly as his fellow-Love Morticians had eyed him on occasions when he had lost it, himself, back in high school.