Trailer Park Hippie II: Hippies On The Hump

TWO: The Love Morticians/Fall 1968

During my senior year at Morton High, I had lived more or less on my own in trailer #37 at Adolf’s East Morton Trailer Park, so the Love Morticians had spent a lot of time at my “house,” rehearsing, playing records, doing drugs, balling their girlfriends, and generally just being cool. More than once, Bo had bummed a half-tab of acid from one of the others, only to start screaming 30 minutes later in fear of his hallucinations. Cringing in a corner, he would swear that the flowers on my mother’s old couch cover were exploding like bombs, placing us all in danger of horrible mutilation. Once, he claimed to have been attacked by a juicy pear into which he had bitten shortly after dropping some (reputed) Orange Sunshine: “Ouch! s**t! Motherfucker bit me back!” he screamed. “My mouth bleedin’, man?” And he opened wide that cavity for our inspection while the culprit fruit still dripped in his hand.

              At such times, most of us tried to ignore him or told him he would come down soon or put on some music that he liked. (He was a Hendrix fanatic who played his two albums, Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold as Love, over and over again on his little sister’s scratchy mono record player until the needle went right through the worn-out vinyl grooves.) If we appeased him, his acid crisis would generally pass, but the Robust Boy’s tactic was to call his bluff, instead:

               “Okay, Bo, get your shoes on. We’re taking you to the hospital,” Robust would say. This usually shut Bo up, but not forever. One night at trailer #37, after doing some of JT’s Windowpane blotter acid and suffering a severe attack from a confrontational apple, Bo predictably freaked out. Unpredictably, however, when Robust suggested the hospital, Bo frantically drew on his trademark, multicolored, psychedelic high-top K-Mart tennis shoes (decorated with his little brother’s model car paint) and stood up ready to be driven to the emergency room of Morton Mercy.

              Who was chosen to drive him--or selected by default as the only licensed driver not tripping? Who else but yours truly? Storm, who had left her husband and was staying with me in the trailer, offered to go along, but I wanted her to stay and keep a lid on things. (Yes, beautiful, freaky, tripped-out Storm, by virtue of her age alone--21 to our late teens--was the most responsible person in the trailer that night.) So, I took Bo, along with the Robust Boy. It was only fair that he go, since Bo had called his bluff. Robust pushed Bo into the rear seat of my brown ‘61 Chevy Bel Air and sat back there with him while Bo, occasionally screaming at some invisible horror, pressed his face against the glass and climbed the windows of the car. As his antics intensified, Robust and I exchanged eye-rolling glances in the rearview mirror.

              “I think I saw this in a movie once.” Robust frowned in mock seriousness. “I’m sure I saw this in a movie.” He was convinced that Bo was faking, but Bo raved on.

              “So, what do we say at the hospital?” I asked Robust, who had a great facility for quick fabrication. In times of boredom, we would often demand that he tell us a classic “Robust Story,” and he would relate the tale of the bird that had once relieved itself on his head and left him thereafter with a small circle of pure white hair in the center of his brown mop. He would then show us that white spot as evidence of his veracity. (This was before he bleached all his hair blond to match the spot.) Or he would tell the story of how he had once crashed in his little red wagon and knocked out--or thought he’d knocked out--his two front teeth, only to discover the next week, after wrecking and falling out of his wagon again, that the teeth had magically reappeared. Obviously, they had been pushed up into his gums for a week and then, upon second impact, had come back out at a new angle that left him with an overbite he had not had before the first wagon mishap. After telling this one, he would display his buckteeth as proof of his story and swear to G/god that it was absolutely true.

              “Oh, Robust!” we would howl derisively. “Tell us another. Tell us one we’ll never believe!”

              “I swear to God!” he would repeat in dead seriousness.

              Now he pondered my request for an emergency-room story, but only for a moment. “We were all down on the Street,” Robust explained convincingly, leaning forward and warming to his narrative. “We came out of the Sandal Shop, and a guy with really long hair offered Bo a drink of his wine, so Bo took it. Then, on the way home, he started acting crazy. We thought we’d better bring him to the hospital right away. Might be drugs!” He sniffed with satisfaction.

              “Cool,” I said.

              “They’ll shoot him down with some Thorazine.”

              “Keep him all night, or we gotta wait for him?”

              “They’ll call Larry and Lulu to come and get him.” Robust said this just to scare Bo. We really planned to go back and pick him up later.

              “Hey,” Bo panted desperately at the mention of his parents. “Hey, wait, man. Look!” He left off clawing at the window and pointed through it to a slender, blue-jean-belled adolescent girl walking alone down the street. “See that little chick? The Needle Brothers told me, man, anytime you’re freaking on acid, balling a chick will bring you right down, brother!” He looked from Robust to me, awaiting help to enact his brilliant plan for the treatment of poor souls—specifically himself--suffering from overdoses of LSD.

              Robust and I broke out laughing.

              “No s**t, man!” insisted Bo. “No s**t. Those guys’ve done tons of acid!”

              “Now that’s true,” agreed Robust.

              “Makes sense to me.” I pulled to the curb near the innocently strolling teen, leaned across the seat, and rolled down the passenger window. “Excuse me, Miss,” I said. “We have a sick friend here, and we need your help.”

              The girl stopped. She was cute enough and appeared upon close inspection to be about 13. “You lost?” she asked, looking at us as though we were crazy, which reaction was understandable. No one in his right mind would spend a Friday or Saturday night cruising East Morton if he were not unfortunate enough to have been born there, and, if he had been born there, certainly he should be able to find his way through the city streets.

              “No, no,” I assured her and nodded toward Bo in the back seat. “This young man behind me is losing it, freaking out, suffering from an overdose. He’s taken a dab too much LSD tonight and needs to engage in, well, uh, s****l intercourse in order to avoid a trip to the hospital.” I lowered my voice to a delicate whisper. “We’re wondering if you would like to get in the back seat with him for a little while and, uh, sort of do your good deed for the day--or night. We won’t insult you by offering you money, but we will be happy to turn you on to some of the same stuff that freaked him out in the first place, and we’ll certainly give you a ride home afterward. We would consider it a big favor. It could keep us all from spending hours in the emergency room. What do you say?”

              “He’s the drummer for the Love Morticians!” Robust chimed in. “You heard of ’em, right? Dozen groupies we know would kill to be in your shoes right now!”

              Bo said nothing on his own behalf, but looked on expectantly, then made as if to open the door for his junior Florence Nightingale to join him in the back of the old brown Bel Air and begin treatment immediately.

              A look of pure horror lit the girl’s young face before she turned and ran down the sidewalk at full speed, screaming in fear of the drug-crazed lunatics abroad that night in the thoroughfares of her lawless hometown.  Robust and I, driving on, began to howl, too, not with fear but with mirth, until we saw the Morton Mercy “Emergency Room” sign, which sobered us all a little.

              “Feels like I’m coming down now, man,” said Bo.

              “No way,” responded Robust. “You’re going in.” 

              Of course, the first question the ER nurse asked us was about insurance. She then stared at me with bare tolerance as, rather than answer her question, I told the Calhoun Street story Robust had concocted. When I finished, she asked me for Bo’s telephone number. “We have to find out if there’s insurance,” she said.

              “But shouldn’t you examine him right away? He’s pretty--”

              “Insurance,” she repeated, expressionless.

              Intimidated by the machinations of the hospital, we gave her Bo’s phone number and even his parents’ names.

              This was my first trip to the emergency room, but certainly not my last. On subsequent visits, I would learn that, regardless of a patient’s condition, the primary concern of the hospital personnel was the presence or absence of medical insurance, and that the parents of anyone younger than eighteen had to be contacted before any treatment would be administered. Even when I stood, more than a year later during the Coal Street period, the patient myself, bleeding profusely from a head wound inflicted by that same Bo I had driven to the hospital in high school, the nurse’s first word--after JT, who had driven me, explained there were no contactable parents--would be “insurance,” of which I had none, of course.

              But I guess Bo’s father, Larry, had a good benefits package at Puckitt Paper, where he worked second shift as a security guard, because the nurse eventually admitted Bo and had him wheeled away into the bowels of the hospital. Robust and I returned to the trailer park.

              When we re-entered trailer #37, we found Storm, JT, Bony, and others still happily tripping and listening to records. Fresh joint in hand, Robust related the story of our ride to the hospital.

              “You asked the chick if she would get in the back seat and ball him?” laughed JT.

              Storm’s reaction was to fall across my lap in uncontrolled hysteria. “I would have done it!” she blurted, succumbing to a giggling fit. “I would have! Oh, far out!”

              After we had exhausted the humor of our tale, we continued to sit in the “black light” (I had replaced the bulbs in all the trailer’s lamps with ultra-violet globes from Trivett’s, a huge antique store/head shop in Cincinnati), smoking pot and listening to Hendrix, Cream, Country Joe and the Fish, Big Brother and The Holding Company, and others at such volume that, if the phone rang that night, we didn’t hear it. Needless to say, we never made it back to the hospital to check on Bo.

              Stupid us: We thought that Larry and Lulu would never know what had happened to their son, but of course they were contacted by the hospital when we didn’t show up to collect him. L&L then phoned JT’s mom and dad, who phoned others to gossip and commiserate over the shenanigans of their misguided teenage offspring.

              When I dropped Robust off very late that night, his parents (Moose and Ella) were actually standing out in front of their house, waiting for us to show up. Moose (who probably had a cousin or two up on The Hump, himself) jerked Robust out of the car without ceremony to stare into his eyes and sniff his breath, demonstrating complete but forgivable cluelessness regarding our substances of choice. Moose thought his son had been drinking, which was the furthest thing from the truth. We heads considered drinking alcohol positively uncool, an Establishment thing that one’s parents did. With the exception of the less discriminating Bo, whose hand was permanently molded to the neck of a quart Hudepohl bottle (“a buzz is a buzz, brother,” went his theory), we used illegal drugs, only.

              After examining his son there in the street, Moose stuck his head through my car window and stared with righteous belligerence at all us of inside, especially at petite, gorgeous, long-haired, tripping Storm, who was sitting half on my lap with her hair wild and her breasts spilling out of her fringed leather halter top, as usual. She had just shoved the joint she was smoking into the ashtray and was holding in a lungful of smoke until we could get away from Robust’s house. I sensed her chest-bursting effort not to exhale in front of Moose, whose angry eyes dropped from her face to her bust line and, eventually, rose again. “You ain’t no schoolgirl!” he proclaimed. “You’re a-contributin’ to the d’linquency a mahnors! At’s agin the law!” 

              At this accusation of wrongdoing, Storm, peaking on her acid, could not help giggling out a fragrant cloud of m*******a smoke, which I tried to wave away from Moose’s face, but I needn’t have bothered. Again, he had no clue as to what was going on, despite the olfactory evidence floating about his nose. “And cigarettes is bad for yer health, young lady!” he warned harshly.

              Storm, who did not smoke cigarettes, got brief control of herself and nodded with polite vigor to express her agreement. “They are, for sure, sir!” she said, involuntarily emitting more smoke. “And I really don’t know any miners, sir. I’ve hardly ever been to Kentucky!” She sputtered and coughed out the remainder of the smoke in her lungs as the rest of us in the car roared and squealed with drug-crazed laughter. Moose, his rage now blended with a bewildering fear of the fiends his son called friends, backed his head out of my window.

              I dropped the Bel Air into drive.

             “Hey, like, peace, Mr. . . .uh . . Moose?” Storm called, climbing across me and half out the window to wave a friendly goodbye, completely oblivious to the fact that one breast had finally worked itself free of her tight, twisted halter and was completely exposed. I gunned the car down the street while she lapsed again into helpless giggling and fell back inside, her flying yard of hair obscuring my vision. I was so proud of her, my tiny, stunning, freaky, sexy, grown-up, married girlfriend--though we were too cool to use the term, “girlfriend”; I might have called her my chick, if anything, though Tonya was technically my chick--that I thought I would explode.

              “Y’all better git home and report!” Moose barked at us as we pulled away. “You damn shore stirred somethin’ up this tahm!” In my rear-view mirror I saw him stare, open-mouthed for a split-second, at Storm’s flashing n****e, then forcibly tear his eyes away, do an about-face, and march the Robust Boy into the house.

           As it turned out, we hadn’t really stirred up all that much trouble—not yet, anyway. The hospital had simply informed Larry and Lulu that their son was suspected of ingesting an illegal “hallucinogenic substance.” L & L retrieved Bo from Morton Mercy later that night and, as he recounted for us the next day, interrogated him about this “substance” all the way home:

           “So what kind of trailer-park-hippie nonsense landed your butt in the hospital tonight, boy?” asked Larry. “Doctor said you seemed to be on some kinda dope!”

           “Some kinda what?” asked Bo incredulously.

           “What the hell’d that doctor call it, Lulu?”

           “‘Lusa-Jetic substance’ was what it sounded like to me, Larry,” Bo’s mother responded, “but that could be a brand name, I suppose.”

           “So, what the hell is this Lusa-Jet?” demanded Bo’s irate father. “Is it dope?”

           “Never heard of it,” claimed Bo.

           “What do you mean, you never heard of it? Don’t you lie to me, boy. You smoke this stuff, or what?”

           “No sh—I mean, honest, Dad. We was just drinkin’ grape Kool-Aid all night long--and playin’ Chinese Checkers.”

           “What in the hell are you talkin’ about now? How mucha this Lusa-Jet are you on, anyway, son? You sniff it-- like glue, or what? Huh?”

           “Kool-Aid musta been old, Dad,” Bo said. “Made me sick, I guess.”

           “Oh, son,” said Lulu, “I’ve kept packs of Kool-Aid up in the cupboard for, I know, two years or more. You kids drank it down like water and never made a peep.”

           “We just never told you, Mom,” Bo said.

           “Told me what?”

           “We all felt kinda sick around the house when we were kids.”

           “Since when?”

           “Ever since I can remember. That’s why I missed so much school and flunked, I think—drinkin’ that old cherry Kool-aid you used to give us for breakfast every day.”

           “You didn’t have it every day, son.   

           “And that lime flavor you used to give us with our Cocoa Puffs—ooh, puke, puke.”

           “Why, I never—”

           “We saw a show on TV one time about how you could divorce your parents and then sue ‘em for that kinda stuff, but I talked the other kids out of it. I bought ‘em some orange Fizzies with my allowance, so they wouldn’t have to drink that nasty old Kool-Aid all the time.”

           “That’s it,” Larry said. “You can’t come up with no better than that, I’m calling the damn law on all of you.”

           “On your own son?” Bo asked.

           “Now, Larry,” Lulu said.    

           “If he’s on dope, he ain’t no son of mine!”             

           So, Larry and Lulu formed a united front with the other parents (mine, one dead and one crazy, were not consulted, thank G/god) to get to the bottom of their children’s baffling behavior. The length of our hair had been hard enough for them to accept. (At that time in history, looking from the rear and from the waist up, one could not always tell his son from his daughter.) But they drew the line at “dope.” If we would give them a credible explanation for Bo’s trip to the hospital, the parent committee decreed, they would keep the matter private, but they had a right to know what their kids were up to. They feared for our safety. (What if we were all on dope?!!) If we would not come clean, they would go to the MPD and, yes, demand to have their own children investigated, regardless of the shame that action would bring down on their heads from the rest of the community where they had to live and work each day, and so on.

           Investigate what exactly? Well, me, I suppose, or my trailer, where our escapades generally began and ended since I, at age 17, with my father deceased and my mother in Longview State Hospital, had trailer #37 to myself. I was living there essentially unsupervised (if you don’t count the “guidance” I received from the older woman in my life at the time) between alternate weekends when my mother came home on a pass. A competent investigator might very well have been able to find something incriminating on the premises, so I probably had the most to lose if the police got involved.

              Some of the parents were slightly less obtuse than Moose and Ella and might have had vague suspicions about our drug use already. They also had heard from Moose that Storm was in the car on the night in question. He had gotten Robust to confirm she was over 21 when she left her straight husband and more or less moved into the trailer with 17-year-old me. So now, to the threatened drug charges were added accusations of adultery and statutory rape on her part, which boosted my ego no end, I might as well admit. As cool as we were, though, we were naive enough about the law to be intimidated by the parents’ threats; we agreed to tell them some version of the truth so as not to run afoul of the local authorities. Of course, I was elected to be the mouthpiece.

              Maybe everybody expected me to lie, but I didn’t. Since I was fortunate enough to have no parents at home to make my life hell afterward, I welcomed the chance to “wave my freak flag high,” in the words of Jimi Hendrix. If we’re truly freaks, I figured, let’s not cop out to the Establishment. Let’s stand up to the world and proclaim ourselves the freaks that we really are. So, when the parents called a big, multi-family meeting at JT’s house, I took Storm with me in case they were curious to see just who was statutorily raping me. I was happy to show my foxy little rapist off to anybody I could--except Tonya!

              When we arrived, JT’s mother, after a quick look of appraisal at Storm, put on her saddest countenance to tell us, “You boys are letting your hair be your god.” She must have said it a half-dozen times that evening as she served up a ton of food. Everybody sat in a kind of circle around the gold-carpeted living room, in chairs and on the sectional sofa, munching sandwiches, slurping punch and looking expectantly at me. Of course, all the fathers’ eyes slid toward Storm, who wore her skin-tight, hip-hugger blue jean bells (she had replaced her zipper with criss-crossed rawhide laces, and I knew there was nothing underneath), high-heeled snakeskin boots (which made her barely five feet tall), and a revealing halter-top under a buckskin vest with fringe that dragged the floor. Her straight, waist-length, reddish-blond hair was gleaming and adorned with a beaded Indian headband worn horizontally across her forehead. Built like a miniature Playboy centerfold, she was hipper than hip without sacrificing an ounce of femininity to freakiness. On her face was a completely sincere smile expressive of warmth and peace, and she sent out beautiful vibrations of love to everyone around her, even to the mothers who glanced sideways at her. I must admit I experienced a surge of adrenaline as I began to speak for her, myself, and my friends. I was going to flout the failing Fascist authority of these tragically uncool, laughably straight mothers and fathers. Since I had none to worry about, the parents of others meant nothing to me. They had agreed not to call the pigs if we were honest with them, so I was going to take advantage of the opportunity to be honest. I would give them honesty and see if they could handle it.

              As I began to speak and looks of shock and anger spread across the faces of the adults, I got even further into it. They were old and pitiably square in their wingtips and hushpuppies and housedresses--insurance men and real estate agents and night watchmen and school cafeteria managers. They deserved to be shocked. They needed to wake up to the fact that it wasn’t 1950 anymore. 

              “Dig it,” I said. “Here’s our thing: Your generation believes in war; we believe in peace. Your generation believes in materialism; we don’t. We believe in sharing what we have and digging life. Your generation turns on with alcohol; ours doesn’t. We turn on with  . . . other stuff. It’s no different, and you can’t judge us for it. If you drink beer, that’s the same as us smoking grass. You drink whiskey? We do acid. So what?” I did not tell them that I didn’t even do acid. Let them cling to their preconception that I, as the ringleader, must be ingesting more illegal substances than anybody else. The fact that I was not was beside the point.

              “But that stuff’s against the law,” one of the parents pointed out stupidly. “Beer and whiskey are legal, for God’s sake.”

             At this I laughed out loud and looked at my friends, who tittered behind their hands along with me. Storm smiled tolerantly, awaiting my comeback. “Cheating on your taxes is against the law, too,” I responded brilliantly. “Have you ever done that? Maybe we should call the IRS and report you right now.” I stood up and made as if to look around for the telephone, then sat down and went smugly on: “It’s not our fault a bunch of corrupt old congressmen don’t have the sense to vote antique laws off the books.” Then I stood up again. “I think whiskey should be illegal, right? See how your generation likes being deprived.” I looked at my friends and shrugged, feeling the rush of reckless rebellion. “You want the truth?” I asked rhetorically. Then I quoted The Who’s “My Generation”: “‘I hope I die before I get old!’ That’s as true as it gets! Peace!” I said and made a dramatic exit from the room.

             Storm, more polite than I, tried to smooth things over, though I really didn’t want her to. She followed me to the door, touched my arm, and turned, still smiling toward everybody. “Thank you for the food,” she said. “The salad was out of sight. I didn’t try any of the murdered animal flesh, but I’m sure it was far out, too. Please just love your kids and each other and be cool tonight.” Then she looked up at me and smiled mischievously, preparing a parting shot of her own. “And,” she said, “if anyone is interested, he just turned eighteen last week, so I’m not, like, ‘raping’ him anymore . . . not statutorily, anyway. Peace. Goodnight!”

             I draped my arm around her shoulders as we walked, drenched in incomparable hipness, out into the night and roared away in the orange Mustang Storm’s husband had bought as a wedding present for his bride.

              Whether my speech had satisfied anybody, I didn’t know, but the police were not called, and the next weekend we were all back at trailer #37, tripping (except for me), smoking grass, and digging the new Doors album, though maybe a little more quietly than we had the week before, lest someone call in a complaint to Adolf or the pigs. I permitted Bo only a quarter hit of acid, and he managed to maintain on that, though he did say that he received a mild electrical shock while urinating--something about mysteriously electrified water in the toilet and the charge traveling upstream toward him as he relieved himself.

              “Sounds like the kinda s**t Mona used to say,” I told him, “before the old man put her ass away.”

              That stuff all happened back when we were still in high school, but even on Coal Street a year later, we didn’t allow Bo more than a quarter hit of acid. He was just too unstable.