Trailer Park Hippie II: Hippies On The Hump

FOUR: 1777 Coal St./November-December 1969

Neither Very nor Casper was at home, thank G/god, when the neighbors broke our window to deliver their racist “Christmas card.” The black man illiterately referred to therein as “nigor” was Casper Jones, whose unlikely name was not the result of any aura reading by his parents. His older siblings had nicknamed him “Casper, The Friendly Ghost” (a popular TV cartoon character of the time) to tease him for having the lightest complexion in the Jones family.

              A child no more, Casper was now Very’s man from the Nut Bar, a soul joint down in the Second Ward, where--in the curly, raven-black, waist-length Woolworth’s wig that covered her white, inch-long, bleach-burnt real hair--Very worked nights as a cocktail waitress. Her name was Veronica, but everybody called her Very because she was just very, very . . . something that was hard to put one’s finger on, though Casper seemed to be able to--or perhaps did not even try.

              Very was working Christmas Eve at the Nut, where there was a big holiday party, and Casper had borrowed my car to go down there, wait for her, and bring her home. Ever protective and solicitous, he usually hung out at the bar when Very was working. Of course, she kept him supplied with free cans of cold Colt .45 malt liquor, the price of which she managed to add to the checks of her other customers throughout the night. Very was very capable in such practical matters. Maybe that was one of the things that had attracted Casper to her in the first place. Or maybe it was just the wig.

              “All ‘em Nut-niggas be tryin’ talk to my b***h, I don’t be in there,” Casper often pointed out to us when arranging to take my vehicle or JT’s (Bo and Bony had neither car nor license between them) to go down and sit at the Nut from about 11:00 until Very got off at 2:00 a.m. 

              “But I ain’t talkin’ back to no Nut-niggas, is I, baby?” Very would respond if Casper voiced his suspicions in front of her. “And you drinking plenty Free-Fo’-Fi’s [free Colt .45s], ain’t you, baby?” Her relationship with Casper made it acceptable for her to adopt a black accent and to use racist terminology almost as freely as Casper himself did, but none of the rest of us would use it. We were also enlightened enough not to say “n***o” or “colored,” which had been considered acceptable through the early-mid 1960s. We knew that “black dude” and “black chick” were proper and respectful terms for us to use (though then-developing Feminist-Speak would soon abolish “chick” for a decade or two). Nor was it considered insulting at that time to call a black man a “spade.” (The term “African-American” did not yet exist.) Casper himself often referred to other black men as spades, once he picked the word up from us, though more often he called them “niggas” or “brothers.” Women were “sisters” (black) or “bitches” (black or white), the latter of which terms was not necessarily derogatory, to Casper’s way of thinking.

              Our freaky friend Peaceful-Faith, however, challenged him on this point in a speed-inspired political rap as we all sat getting high around the kitchen table one night that autumn, shortly after Casper and Very had moved in: “Casper, my brother,” said the red-headed white girl from the West Side, “like, I really love you as my brother in peace, and I know you are truly so hip in your soul, really, and I think it’s so cool that we’re all here together, so peaceful and digging each other, right? That you and Very are together and there are no, like, racial barriers between you or between us. But, you know, like, I wonder, how can you call women, like, ‘bitches’? You know? I mean, like, a b***h is a dog, right? So, do you, like, put women in the same category as animals? I mean, don’t you think it hurts Very to hear you say that word? Like, I think it insults her as, you know, as a woman, and damages, like, her self-esteem? Do you know what I’m saying? I mean, I know ‘girlfriend’ is totally middle-class, like ‘Suzy Creamcheese’ or something, but wouldn’t you rather call her, like, your ‘lover’ or your ‘soul-mate’ or, like, your . . .?” And so on and so on.

              Now, Casper was not a freak. He was not one of the hip black dudes whose “soul had been psychedelicized” (to quote the Chambers Brothers). We had seen and been properly awed by these rare Jimi Hendrix clones at the Ludlow Garage or the old Black Dome or elsewhere on Calhoun Street in Cincinnati, but there certainly were none in East Morton. Though he never objected to a hit from the passing joint to enhance the effect of his Colt .45 malt liquor or his T.J. Swann wine, Casper did not do downs or speed or acid or any other serious drugs. “Fo’-Fi’ wear off by mawnin’, man. Little weed do, too. That s**t y’all do f**k up yo’ mahnd perm’nent,” he often warned us, but did we heed his words of urban wisdom, Reader? Take a wild guess.

Casper did not have a huge afro or wear bell-bottoms, either. He favored expensive dress clothes like silk shirts, reptile loafers, and “thick-n-thin” socks. On Sundays, he would break out his purple silk “walking suit” and his big white “brim” (with a pink ostrich feather in the band). No doubt, it was the sight of Casper thus decked out for one of his Sunday strolls up to King Kwik with Very that finally prompted our neighbors to threaten us over the racial demographics of our household. Filled with the spirit after a morning of snake handling at the Soul Winners’ Pentecostal Tabernacle of God, the Humpsters were not especially receptive to the spectacle of Superfly Junior pimp-walking around unofficial Klan headquarters with a white woman on his arm. In his mid-twenties, a little older than we were, Casper had grown up in East Morton’s Second Ward and was grounded in the black culture there. His unselfconscious response to Faith’s tirade on his characterization of women as “bitches” was:

“Very proud to be my b***h, ain’t you, baby?” To which question Very nodded blankly, her face open, amiable, and totally unconcerned with the politics of terminology regarding one’s significant other.

              “But Very,” Faith protested to her friend and former roommate, “doesn’t it, like . . . wound you, like, as a woman, I mean?”

              Very turned her unsmiling but pleasantly blank visage toward chain-smoking Faith, who had bummed a handful of Bony’s Kools along with the diet pills he had reluctantly sold her that night. After a silent moment of casual staring, during which Very unconsciously commanded the attention of everyone at the table, she shook her head at “Peaceful” and frowned, achieving great effect through this contrast with her usual lack of expression.

“Peach Pit,” she said seriously to Faith, dropping her black accent and reverting to the mountain-tinted half-drawl of her Kentucky forebears, “you done lost it on them brown-and-whites, Honey. Don’t make Bony sell you no more.”

At which comment we in the kitchen all roared with helpless laughter. Very did not realize that she had said anything funny until she heard us breathlessly repeating, “‘Peach Pit,’ f*****g ‘Peach Pit’!” Then she instantly slapped her leg and guffawed along with us.

              “Peeeeaceful,” whined stricken Faith. “I’m Peaceful!”

              “You also JT’s b***h,” Casper informed her, “and shoult be proud of it.”

              “Oh, God!” Faith moaned in shock. “Oh, God! JT would never call me that,” which was true. JT was probably the most “politically correct” (another term not yet coined) among us at that time though I could see he was stifling a laugh at Casper and Very’s tormenting of his “b***h,” with whom his relationship was in fact very casual and who did not technically live on Coal Street but resided in her parents’ large West Morton home, where, until recently, Very also had been a resident--or maybe just a very long-term guest.          

Until Thanksgiving (1969), the day Peaceful-Faith’s parents kicked Very out of their basement, she had been living there rent-free for quite a while with her friend. With food and lodging provided, both young women silently declined to look for any kind of work that might interfere with their daily schedule: sleep until noon; watch soap operas until 5:00; bathe, wash (and, in Faith’s case, iron) their hair, and dress until 8:00; party from 9:00 until dawn (or until the dope ran out) at 1777 Coal Street. Faith had been forced to disrupt her education in order to keep up this demanding regimen, dropping out of Southwestern Ohio Community College after only one semester of study.

I, too, was nominally enrolled at SWOCC (which I had secretly christened “Straight, Weird, and Overly Conservative College”) because furthering my education was one of the Fascist conditions unilaterally imposed upon me by the Social Security Administration, which had issued me a monthly check ever since my father’s death the previous year. To my way of thinking, said check certainly should have been forthcoming, regardless of my educational status, by virtue of my father’s contributions to the SS fund throughout his 30-plus years of work as a truck driver. If, however, we hippie draft-dodgers and ne’er-do-wells of the late 60s thought our governmental agencies corrupt and totalitarian at that time in history, we had no idea of the institutionalized Fascism awaiting us in the coming millennium. (Our generation at least found the time and motivation to sit in or march together in protest of the crimes perpetrated upon us by our corrupt elected officials.)

              Anyway, Faith’s mother and father could hardly evict their own useless, no-account daughter from their home, dream of it though they might. On Thanksgiving, though, after Faith and Very had roused themselves just in time to eat healthy portions of the turkey dinner prepared by Faith’s mother and a host of aunts and sisters-in-law, then retired again to their basement apartment to sleep off the feast while those female relatives attacked the dirty dishes, Faith’s parents decided that Very, at least, must go--that very day.  Her departure would give them something for which to be thankful, so Faith’s father went down to the basement to give the sated nappers the bad news.

“Oh, Gaaawwd, Dad,” whined Peaceful-Faith from beneath her paisley velour bedspread, “you’re such a drag on holidays. Can’t you see that we just don’t buy into the whole middle-class convention of women, like, cooking and doing dishes all day just because they’re women? You can’t expect us to be like Mom, for God’s sake!” Then Faith plopped back onto her pillow and went to sleep while Very packed her suitcase, amiably said goodbye to her hosts and their relatives now sipping coffee in the living room, and left. She hitchhiked across town to our house on Coal Street, where Stoni was displaying a surprisingly domestic, “middle-class” facet of her own character: She’d actually postponed her holiday sopor-eating until after she had roasted a turkey in our virgin oven!

              Very left her suitcase on our porch and casually joined the rest of our guests for her second Thanksgiving dinner that day, making no mention of her residential dilemma. As I would find out later, she was immune to pressures that made the average person nervous. When the Thanksgiving festivities had wound down, she passed out on our floor (the couch was occupied by a couple of sleepless, guitar-playing, teenaged acid-heads whose names we did not know) and spent the night on Coal Street.     

              Say what you like about her, Very was, among other things, very practical. As long as she had lived in Faith’s parents’ house, she’d had no need of a job and had not looked for one. She slept and ate there free of charge and was completely untroubled by any of the guilt or self-consciousness that might have afflicted others in such a situation. When her status changed on Thanksgiving, though, she knew that she suddenly did need a job, so she woke up early the next morning and braved our bathroom to shower before anyone else was stirring. She then tiptoed, naked and dripping, into my room in search of a towel, which Stoni got up and found for her. (I probably could not have located one--clean or dirty, wet or dry--even if I had been conscious.) Dried and dressed, Very walked up to King Kwik, which was at the end of our street, next door to Cooley Intermediate School at the crest of The Hump. Inside the store, she slipped a pack of powdered mini-donuts and a small carton of milk down her shirt and wedged them into her ample cleavage (there was no room in her pants for contraband), then went, smiling blankly, to the cashier and paid ten cents for a Morton Journal. Sitting on a curb in the parking lot, she munched her breakfast and read the classifieds. When she was finished, she stood up, brushed her clothes to remove any white powder, and hitchhiked down to Walnut Street to answer an ad for a cocktail waitress at the Nut Bar. She told me all this later and noted how surprised the owner had looked when she showed up, a white-as-snow bleach-blonde with a pixie haircut, in the heart of East Morton’s Second Ward.

              “You know, my clientele are all black people,” the owner had said.

              Very had quietly nodded her understanding. I could picture her look of blank agreeability. To my knowledge, she, an East Morton hillbilly girl only a generation removed from the mines and mountains of eastern Kentucky, had never moved in black society before.

              “You gonna feel comfortable working in here?” the owner asked.

              “If I get paid.”

              “Oh, you’ll get paid,” the owner assured her. “In fact, the men in here will probably tip you pretty well. It’s the women might not be so friendly--until they get to know you. But I’m not worried about them. Long as the men are spending, the women will drink and dance.”

              Very nodded again.

              “Well,” the owner said. “All right. If you want to work, you can come on back this afternoon at five and try it out; that’s my Attitude Adjustment Hour.”

              Very nodded once more, convincingly I’m sure. She could often give the impression that there was much more going on inside her head than there really was--I think.

              “All right,” said the owner of the Nut Bar again. He opened his cash register, took out a $20 bill and handed it to Very. “This’ll come out of your first check,” he said. “Go and buy you a wig and some makeup. White is gonna be hard to get used to, but blond and snow white might be impossible, all at once.”         

              On her first night of work that evening, resplendent in her $9.99’s worth of long, black, ringlety Woolworth’s hair and heavy Revlon cosmetics, Very caught the eye of Casper, who had just walked out on his wife after a fight over the projected expense of the upcoming holidays and household finances in general. The wife unfairly blamed her husband for losing his job as a security guard at SWOCC and getting his new Monte Carlo repossessed, as though it were his fault that the white administration had laid off black employees first after the school’s board of directors enacted budget cuts.

“If you’d spend a minute or two less down there drinking with them Nut-niggas, you might still have your car and your job and be able to buy your children something for Christmas!” the wife had accused, bitching and nagging at Casper until he was forced to leave her and his offspring at home and seek comfort right back at the Nut, again, even though he had little money left to spend there. He was trying to turn his coins into dollars in a card game while Very served his table rounds of drinks. Oblivious to the stares of the other customers, she listened blankly between orders (nodding her sincere understanding, I’m sure) to Casper’s tale of woe and bought him several Colt .45s with her first night’s tip money--before she figured out how to overcharge her other customers and get Casper’s beer free. At 2:00 a.m., she called me at 1777 and told me Faith’s parents had kicked her (Very) out, which I knew by then because Faith was already at our house, in JT’s bedroom.

              “Crash here again tonight if you want,” I said.

              “I got a job,” Very announced.

              “Far out.” I did not judge those who copped out to the Establishment by accepting gainful employment in the corrupt capitalist world as long as they did not expect me to do the same. Live and let live was my motto. “Need a ride?” I asked Very.

              “We can call a cab,” she said. “I made tips.”

              “I didn’t have to ask, “Who are ‘we’?” Very anticipated my question:

              “Is it cool if I bring my friend?” she asked.

              “It’s cool. Bring her,” I said. “Door’s open. I’m crashing. Use the couch, use the floor, come in and sleep with me if you can’t find room.”

Why did I say this, Reader, knowing Very as I did? I suppose I entertained a mild before-sleep fantasy of two freaky nubile wenches’ stealing into my room together that night and amorously surrounding me beneath my tie-dyed sunburst sheet of love. No, I didn’t really want to ball Very again, but two lust-crazed hippie girls at once? That was and is a prospect I challenge any self-respecting heterosexual male to ignore. 

              Before her VW broke down that fall, Faith had driven herself and Very over to our house nightly, ingested her fill of whatever substances were on hand, balled JT if he happened to be off work, slept a few hours, then slipped out around dawn and drove back home, to which Very would already have returned by thumb. On their third visit or so, after Faith had stumbled into JT’s bedroom at crash-and-ball time, Very asked me blankly, “Is it cool if I crash here, too?”

“For sure, Very. That’s cool,” I said and headed for the tie-dyed land of slumber, myself. I guess I expected her to take the couch (strangely unoccupied for once), and cover herself with the American flag thereon, as had so many guests before her, but Very rose instead and nonchalantly followed me into my bedroom, quickly stripped, and slid under the brilliant purple-and-orange sheet covering my mattress on the floor. Was she simply overcome with passion, hungry for some lovin’? Guess again, Reader. Emotions such as passion never clouded Very’s clear, blank, practical eye, as far as I could tell. I figured her motivation for inviting herself to my bed was as follows: When Faith spent the night with us, Very, who didn’t drive, had to hitchhike back to Faith’s parents’ house. She wasn’t afraid to thumb across town, but doing so meant: 1) knocking on JT’s bedroom door to ask for Faith’s house key, which Faith was usually unwilling or unable to find (“Jesus, Very, I’m almost, like, transcending! Just climb through the window, for God’s sake!”); 2) going outside to thumb a ride, which journey might expose her to bad weather and take an hour or more if she had to “transfer,” as she put it, from one car to another; and 3) slipping alone (often through an unlocked window) into the house, where she risked being questioned by the parents regarding their daughter’s whereabouts. The alternative to this procedure (lying comfortably on my mattress, allowing herself to be perfunctorily penetrated, then sleeping until Faith was ready to go) was just a lot more practical.

Very didn’t have to ball me to stay there; maybe she just didn’t want to fight our other hippie houseguests for the couch night after night. Anyway, she continued, each time Faith slept with JT, to follow me to bed, strip, and ball, willingly if not inventively, for as long as I chose to continue. Afterward, she would fall instantly asleep (sometimes snoring quietly) and be gone when I awoke.

 Then Faith’s car broke down, and her parents refused to get it fixed unless their daughter either returned to SWOCC or got a job, so we figured Faith and Very would both be thumbing well into the 21st century. Sometimes Very hitchhiked over with Faith; sometimes she came later by herself. Our sleeping arrangements continued as before. Neither of us pretended we were having a “relationship.” I couldn’t imagine having an actual relationship with Very (though Casper would manage to do so later).

I had first met her at a roller-rink “sock hop” the Love Morticians played back in high school. With an oval face and blankly regular features, she wasn’t bad looking (except for that hair). She was big chested, with a round butt, shapely and voluptuous enough in her teens to inspire moderate lust. After calling her up to talk a couple of times, though, I stopped. Her blankness of personality made me uncomfortable on the phone. I had to initiate every interchange, and when I expected a laugh, comment, or response, there would be only silence. These communication issues did not seem to pose a problem for Casper when he arrived on the scene, though, perhaps because he and Very had skipped telephone courtship and started living together the night they met. Also, Casper had encountered the post-high-school Very, who could inspire even more than moderate lust when she was dressed up, with wig and makeup on, especially in a dark room, as long as you didn’t know her too well.

Since she never spent the entire night with me on Coal Street, I never saw her in the morning until after we had stopped sleeping together and she and Casper had moved in with us. Then I did happen to glimpse her on her way from bedroom to bathroom early one afternoon and knew, if I hadn’t known before, that I could never again touch Very in passion.

Earlier that fall on Coal Street, though, before Casper appeared, when she came bare and open-legged to my mattress, I was able to accept the bounty of the universe and have basic s*x with her while it lasted. That was probably because we started BWH--Before Western Hills. After my night with Western Hills, whom I had found more desirable than Very but with whom I had failed, nonetheless, everything changed. Then I just cooled it with Very and started going into my room at night to crash alone. This change in arrangements was never discussed; Very, perceptive in her way, got the idea and slept on the couch if she didn’t feel like thumbing home by herself. There were no negative vibes between us--just a silent, mutual understanding.

              So Very and I were still cool when she asked me if she could bring her friend from the Nut to crash with her at 1777 that post-Thanksgiving night. After we hung up, I made sure the front door was unlocked as usual and went to bed, leaving my bedroom door slightly ajar. When I woke up the next afternoon, I found neither one nor two disheveled seductresses sprawled beside me in poses of spent lust, so I figured they must have slept in the living room. Anxious to check out Very’s new “friend” (and perhaps invite that groggy guest to a more comfortable horizontal space chez moi), I pulled on my hip-hugger, bell-bottom Male blue jeans, which cost $8.50 at that time from Merry-Go-Round at the Tri-County Mall in the northern Cincinnati burbs if you could stand the pushy salespeople there; the stores in uptown Morton and the Morton plaza still stocked only straight-leg Levi’s and Wranglers, in which we would not have been caught dead. I ran my big pink comb through my hair, which was cut in a long shag, thin and shoulder-length in back and on the sides, with a short, thick Rod Stewart bird’s nest on top, brushed my teeth, and wandered nonchalantly into the living room.

              On the couch still were the musical young acid-heads, who’d been tripping at our house for at least two days. Their guitars now cast aside, they were devouring a bag of chocolate chip cookies they’d stolen from King Kwik, chewing furiously and glaring at Daffy Duck cartoons on my little black-and-white television set. I reminded myself to ask JT if he knew who these two characters were.

              On the floor near their moccasined feet, blissfully entwined and snoring against the background of our shocking turquoise carpet, lay Casper and Very, whom I did not recognize right away in her Woolworth’s wig (now somewhat askew). I thought at first this brunette might be the “friend” she had mentioned, but, if so, then where was Very? And who was the black dude? I moved a little closer, noted the empty T.J. Swann bottle lying beside them on the floor, then recognized at last Very’s peaceful countenance, only slightly more blank in slumber than in consciousness. I finally deduced that the man was the “friend” I had assumed would be female. Of course, I saw that he was black, but the significance of having a guest of African descent on The Hump simply did not cross my mind at the moment. Nor did I think about it when Very asked me, after waking up about 3:00 p.m., if she and Casper could move in with us at 1777 Coal Street. I suppose I had not yet developed much Hump-consciousness.

              “We can pay rent,” she told me, briefly describing Casper’s terrible ejection from the home of his hateful wife and his plan to look for work immediately. “We’ll just crash in the living room. Nobody has to move or nothing.”

              “If you can pay fifty a month,” I said, “You can have my room.”

              Very questioned me silently by lifting her normally invisible but now heavily penciled eyebrows a millimeter or two.   

              “I’m moving into the family room,” I answered.

              Satisfied with my explanation, she relaxed her forehead and nodded blankly, then pulled a wadded $10 bill from her pocket. “I’ll give you all my tips until it’s fifty,” she said sincerely, believably, touchingly, then laughed and slapped me on the arm and let loose with what was, for her, a longish speech: “Casper ‘bout lost it when he saw we was headed for The Hump last night, man. He started to jump outta the cab, but I told him you guys didn’t come from here. You just moved up here ‘cause you needed a crib and you was all cool and shit.” 

Of course, I should have taken Casper’s apprehension about The Hump as a warning, but, stupidly, I still did not give our neighbors a thought. I told Very I would talk to JT when he and Faith had finished their “morning” lovemaking, to the sounds of which we were all being treated, thanks to Faith’s enthusiastically vocal responses:

“Oooh, JT! Transcend with me, transcend! . . . Ooooh, Ooooh, Gaaawd!”

“Don’t have no heart attack in there, Peaches,” muttered Very, her empty expression giving way to a crazed grin when she heard my giggling at her deadpan comment.

JT finally emerged from his room in his Male blue jean bells, the ass of which was only slightly more covered with suede and leather patches than was mine. Into the midst of these patches, Faith, who was something of a seamstress, had sewn a small American flag for her man. JT then wore his favorite jeans to work one night and was told unceremoniously by his co-workers that if he ever did so again, he would find his treasonous pants off and a yard of asbestos shoved up his unpatriotic ass. As it was, he had to stand up all that night, even during his lunch break, so as not to disgrace the flag by sitting on it:

              “Do y’all cut up little squaars of it to wahp yer ace on, too, up are in ‘at hippie Commie-une whar you live? Well, not hyere, boy. This hyere’s Amuraka!”

              “Oh yeah? I thought America was a free country.”

              “Damn raht, it is. Free fer Amurakins, not fer a buncha Com’nist hippie queers wanna disgrace are flag! Don’t you thank about sittin’ down tonaht, JT. Don’t even thank it.”

In preparation for our household conference, JT and I pushed the dirty dishes and empty cereal boxes and ashtrays full of m*******a roaches that covered our kitchen table into a more compact mess taking up only 80% of the space thereon, thus clearing a small corner where we could drink a cup of Constant Comment tea and share a block of what the proprietor at East Morton Health Foods swore was natural, organic carob (thus the high price), not poisonous real chocolate full of sugar, chemicals, and preservatives. We were a little skeptical of our local macrobiotic store, however, and had been ever since the day we’d spotted said flabby, bearded proprietor on his lunch hour, heartily enjoying the meat loaf and instant mashed potato special at the East Avenue Diner around the corner from his own bead-curtained and black-light-postered establishment. “Aw, you know, you got to have a little change of pace once in a while,” he had mumbled by way of explanation as he paid his check and led us back to his store for an expensive bag of “organic” brown rice.               

              I put the idea of the two new roommates to JT, and he went along with it. (Since he and I had paid the deposit and the first month’s rent on the house, we figured we were entitled to make all household decisions without consulting Bo or Bony.) Before too long, of course, we would have to ask ourselves how, how, how we could ever have been so stupid as to accept Casper and Very into our home. Looking back, I think there were three basic reasons for our stupidity: 1) We believed that they would pay their share of the rent, which we needed because Bo and Bony were not paying any; 2) as peace- and love-espousing freaks, we had to live up to our creed and could not deny the shelter of our household to a brother and sister in need; 3) our primary goal in life at that time was to be as hip as possible, and taking a black dude into our household was extraordinarily hip. All the freaks we knew in Morton were white. There were no minority heads in our town, but we had seen racially mixed groups of people like us (or like the freaks we wanted to be) in Cincinnati, and we knew these big city heads were cooler than we were because we were from East Morton and they were not. Although Casper was not a head, maybe we could make him into one. Either way, he was a minority, and taking him into our freaky household showed that we really believed and lived by the principles of equality and brotherhood that we all preached, that there were no barriers of race or color for us. Taking Casper and Very in just made us that much cooler than we already were--or so we thought at the time.