Trailer Park Hippie II: Hippies On The Hump

THREE: 1777 Coal St./Christmas Eve 1969

“Come on, Peace Pipe,” said Bo, taking another lungful of smoke from what was now a roach and plucking my comb from Faith’s lap, where his hand, unnoticed by our stricken guest, lay for just a second longer than necessary. “Don’t bleed on the carpet. Red don’t go with turquoise.” He pulled her up from the floor. “Make us lose our deposit.”

              “Peacefuuul!” Faith whined as Bo put his arm around her waist and walked her out of the living room, the toe rings on her shuffling, bare feet catching in the bright blue-green nap of our ugly rug. “Oh God, I’m freaking!” I hoped she was too far out of it to register the disgusting condition of our bathroom. (But wait: What kind of hip philosophy was that? Why clean one’s bathroom at all? To impress other people? How plastic! Dirt was natural, was it not?)

              “Whose deposit?” I yelled over Van Morrison as Bo’s hand slipped to oblivious Faith’s tightly denimed hip. JT and I had rented the house with the understanding that Bo and Bony would start paying rent “as soon as they got jobs,” which had yet to happen--except for Bo’s very brief stint of employment (the second, actually) at the East Morton Auto Scrub--in the two months we had lived on Coal Street.         

              “Why hassle him about bread?” asked my own guest, Stoni, who was sitting above and behind me on our American flag-draped couch, playing intently with the ends of my hair. “So, he doesn’t have a gig,” she said. “You don’t either, right?”

              “He had a job at the car wash.” I hated the word gig. “Then he got paid, scored some acid, and stayed up all night tripping his brains out and looking at his Peter Max book through his purple, 3-D acid glasses and couldn’t get up the next morning and got f*****g fired—for the second time!”

              “Right,” Stoni nodded and considered this indictment until I assumed she had no further comment. Then she continued, “I can dig that . . . you know. I’ve done the same thing . . . except for the glasses. They give me a headache. Like, his gig will come when it’s supposed to, or it won’t. Why bum him out?” She took the roach from me, placed it between the heads of two matches, fired it with the flame of the candle burning on top of the television and snorted the hot, carbony smoke up her nose. “The car wash had to be a drag, for sure,” she whispered from deep in her throat. Then she held the burning roach for me, and I snorted it as she had.

 We both watched Bo steer Faith into the unclean bathroom and close the door. “Maybe that chick shouldn’t be tripping,” observed Stoni, espousing what sounded like wisdom to me. Her (Stoni’s) parents had read her aura and come up with the name “Estonia,” unusual enough in itself. Her even stranger nickname derived from her status among all who knew her as a veteran doper able to maintain on any amount of anything. Far from the stereotypical, babbling burnout with glazed eyes and nothing to say beyond “far out,” Stoni was smart and always under control. She just preferred to be high rather than straight whenever possible. Tall and lean and aloof, she was like a freaky, female James Dean. You wouldn’t have thought of giving her any s**t. She projected a feminine toughness and a cool cynicism that I found attractive at that time. She rarely smiled, and she gave the impression that she could live as easily without you as with you. If she liked you, though, she would let you know occasionally, and her expressions of fondness were touching by virtue of their rarity. We all respected her hip wisdom, as well as her knowledge of drugs and everything appertaining thereto.  

              “I’m, like, freezing,” she said, folding her arms around herself and nodding toward the shattered window.

            “Right, but what the hell is this?” I indicated the paper-bound rock still lying on the floor next to the ample ass-print left by Faith in the nap of our repulsive rug.

              “What the hell is what?” breathed our fourth original housemate, Bony, as he entered the living room on his umpteenth speed tour of the premises that night, carrying a large piece of cardboard and a roll of tape he had dug up somewhere. “Heard it break,” he panted, amphetamine colliding with menthol-soaked nicotine in his emaciated chest. “You lethargic potheads.” He paused to inhale and exhale loudly. “Have it fixed by Easter.”

              “Somebody threw this s**t through our window, Bone.” I pointed again to the stone missile on the floor. “Check it out.”

              Bony removed the magazine page rubber-banded to the rock and held the slightly torn paper in one quivering hand, pulling alternately with the other at the left and right ends of his Fu Manchu mustache. Squinting through the smoke from the end of the bobbing Kool cigarette perpetually stuck in his mouth when he was speeding, he stared at the message our neighbors had “sent.” Finally, he raised his eyebrows, shook his head, and handed me the page, from which I read aloud for all to hear:

              “‘TIME TO GIT YER NIGOR BOY OFF THE HUMP!’”

              “What?” JT asked.

              “‘N-I-G-O-R,’” I spelled.

“No!” Stoni said.

              Yes, Reader, this was the Yuletide greeting we received from our neighbors on The Hump that Christmas Eve. In honor of the season, they had chosen red crayon with which to scrawl their message across the top margin of the wrinkled magazine page. Ripped from its binding and wrapped around the rock, it had been “hand-delivered” to our humble home a moment before midnight. Below the scribbled red warning was a photograph of a skeletal black man in rags and shackles, face down, his blood pooled beneath him on a dirt road somewhere in Africa--or perhaps in rural Mississippi.

              “National Geographic,” I mumbled to no one in particular as Bo popped out of the bathroom to hit the fresh joint somebody had lit. Before returning to “help” Faith, he paused to gawk over my shoulder and offer his observations:

              “Stold that magazine outa the lie-berry, man,” he said.

              “How you know that?”

              “Did it back in junior high.”

              I looked at him and awaited further elucidation.

              “Got pictures of half-nekked Indian chicks in there,” Bo said. “Old b***h at the desk wasn’t watchin’, I’d tear a page out, stick it down my pants, take it home.”

              “You took a page of National Geographic home to read?”

              “Hell, no, brother!” Bo laughed. “Too damn hard to read. Hid that s**t in the old lady’s bathroom hamper and beat off to the jungle t**s every night before bed. Slept like a baby, man!”

              Although the photo before us was devoid of native female anatomy, I had to agree with Bo’s theory regarding the page’s origin. Surely no one on the Hump actually subscribed to the time-honored publication of which we spoke, required “reading” though it might have been for pubescent male s*x-Ed pupils home schooling themselves in the public libraries of America during the mid-1960s.

              I don’t mean to suggest, Reader, that the residents of The Hump did not read. Guns and Ammo? Every male Humpster received a lifetime subscription on his thirteenth birthday. True Confessions? Females from eight to 80 devoured it weekly. Field & Stream? Well, it was actually not so popular. Sportsmen on The Hump could not relate to fishing the cold lakes of Canada in a shiny new bass boat or wading in hip boots through a bubbling, crystal-clear trout stream in the Rockies. Shod instead in steel-toed work boots (for men) or Converse All-Stars (for boys), the Hump-dwellers did their fishing in the less glamorous waters of the Morton River or the old Mill Pond down by the steel plant.

              Field & Stream also contained too many big words. Why use more than four letters when “bait,” “hook,” “carp,” and “beer” were sufficient vocabulary for the common angler? A few of the more prosperous Hump-dwellers, like our landlord, might have skimmed such an exotic publication as Field & Stream--or even National Geographic--uptown at the News Nook, but buy one? Never--not even to ogle the pictures of bare-breasted indigenous women toiling in the jungles of third-world nations. While many Humpsters did take the daily Morton Journal (oh, beacon of literacy!) for its TV listings and auction announcements, anything resembling serious literature or incisive journalism was as scarce on The Hump as minorities and indoor plumbing.

              We had indoor plumbing, of course. Our house at 1777 Coal Street was one of the nicer ones on The Hump. We also had daily mail delivery, though not on Christmas Eve, when our neighbors’ message arrived. As far as we knew, the mailman came at some time between dawn and noon, a slice of the day with which none of us was all that familiar. After arising in the early p.m. and breakfasting in our malodorous kitchen on Constant Comment tea, a block of carob, and the occasional bowl of granola, housemate JT or I might check the mailbox, he to retrieve his Mother Earth News or Rolling Stone, I in search of my monthly Social Security check. (Housemate Bony also subscribed for a while to Mad--until he got his first bill.) When we had retrieved these important items from the box, we generally tossed the rest of the mail into the garbage--or, when the garbage was too full to hold another envelope (which was fairly often, due to disagreement over whose turn it was to empty the can), on the floor near the garbage, creating a second pile of strictly postal garbage. Most of our disposable mail came from Cincinnati Bell Telephone or the Morton Department of Utilities, and I refused to open bills because they made me nervous. What right did our local government have to send threatening demands for money in return for the necessities of life, like water, to which we all were naturally entitled? How dared they ask me to pay them money in order to exercise my right to drink water—a natural product of precipitation and evaporation? By what decree did they own the water rights to the earth, upon which we all were born with the privilege to partake of its natural sustenance? When someone could answer that question satisfactorily, I might think about paying a water bill—or not.

              I recall that JT sometimes opened the bills and tried to collect money to pay them, but neither Bo nor Bony ever had a dime, and I wasn’t going to pay if they didn’t since JT and I were already paying their rent. JT couldn’t pay the bills by himself, so it was pointless to open them in the first place, really. By the time the City of Morton and Cincinnati Bell got around to shutting off our service and disconnecting our phone, respectively, we were long gone from Coal Street. We didn’t live there that long.  

              We were, in fact, almost midway through our stay when our resourceful neighbors delivered their late-night season’s greeting without benefit of postal service. They simply used a couple of heavy rubber bands to hold the magazine page around a good-sized stone, one small enough to throw but large enough to shatter our window. The sound of the glass breaking was an instantaneous “return receipt” that assured the senders their “mail” had in fact reached us. Their neighborly mission accomplished, they could return to their traditional family holiday entertainments.

I handed the page with its scrawled message to JT. “‘N-I-G-O-R,’” he repeated the misspelled epithet and shook his head as Bony had. “How about some nice spelling books for our neighbors this Christmas? Give the gift of racist literacy.”

Bony nodded and shakily taped his square of cardboard over the gaping hole in our window.

              “Thanks, Bony,” smiled Stoni over my head. “You’re beautiful.” These two shared some sort of Platonic affinity--because of their rhyming names, I supposed. We had suggested they start a vocal duo reminiscent of Sonny and Cher (“Stoni and Bony”) though neither could sing, to the best of our knowledge. Stoni twirled my hair for a while, then spoke again: “I can’t even believe they wrote that word.”

“And spelled it wrong,” said JT.

              “You’re on The Hump, brothers and sisters,” murmured Bony through his cloud of Kool smoke. “Greased Morton at its finest!”