Trailer Park Hippie II: Hippies On The Hump

SEVEN: The Love Morticians/1969

           How had four novice heads like Bo, JT, Bony, and yours truly ever come to live on The Hump in the first place? How did the poor man’s Chicago Seven (aka the “Greased Morton Four”) end up in the KKK’s backyard? Well, we moved there in early September 1969, about a month and a half after Storm and I got back from our trip toward California. Although I had sworn I would never return to East Morton, it felt pretty good to come home once I’d been away for a while. (I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Reader, that homecoming thrill wore off quickly.)

So positive had I been, when I left, that my hometown would never see me again, I’d sold trailer #37 back to Adolf, who owned the trailer park. Thus, I really had no place to live when I returned. My mother had somehow gotten out of Longview State Hospital and gone to stay with her sister in Akron, not that I would have lived with my mother, anyway, if I could’ve helped it.

I spent a few nights in late July with JT in the basement of his parents’ house, from which he wanted to move. He was going to SWOCC by day and working nights at Ohio Asbestos, so he could afford to pay rent. I had my Social Security money, plus about $3,000 from my father’s life insurance, which was useless because I couldn’t get my hands on any of it without approval from the fat, pixie-haired legal secretary who had been appointed financial guardian of my father’s very meager “estate.”

JT and I looked in the paper and found a house for rent in West Morton, the better side of town. Since JT had a job, he went to see the place by himself, showed proof of employment, told the landlord he was getting married (my idea), and paid the first month’s rent and deposit (half of which I’d given him from my Social Security), so we could move in. “We,” however, now included Bo and Bony, who were both dying to get out of their parents’ respective houses and promised to get jobs and pay rent immediately if we would let them move in with us. JT “sponsored” Bony, and I suppose I sponsored Bo, which meant we’d also be seeing a lot of his girlfriend, Little Esther. (Did we balk at the idea of blatant statutory rape being committed beneath our new roof? No, we did not bat an eye, nor give a thought to legalities. We just hoped Esther might pitch in on the housework and do a dish or two for us now and then.)

The house was big--two stories plus an attic, with four bedrooms--in a nice neighborhood. We were impressed with ourselves for “movin’ on up” to the West Side (as though we would actually last there). The place was owned by a realtor and up for sale, but we wanted it so badly that we agreed to move out on a month’s notice if it sold. In fact, we ended up moving out a lot sooner.

When the realtor came by on our first Saturday there to clean out the garage for us, he saw not JT and his mythical bride sharing the bliss of new domesticity in the breakfast nook, but four shirtless, long-haired degenerates roaming in blue jean bell-bottoms around the premises with their various guests, some taking their breakfasts from quart bottles of Hudepohl beer or pungent joints. When the realtor confronted JT, my forthright housemate succumbed to his weakest personality trait (and the one that pissed me off the very most): honesty. He told the damned truth. “We’re already moved in,” JT assured me afterward. “He’s not gonna kick us out now.” This would not be the last time for JT to demonstrate, to our mutual detriment, an unrealistic aversion to lying. The realtor refunded 75% of our money and gave us two weeks to vacate the premises.

              JT called his father, who was a part-time minister, a full-time real estate agent himself, and an all-around nice guy, to discuss our dilemma. One of his clients was the owner of a house that was also up for sale at 1777 Coal Street. JT’s dad asked the owner if he would agree to the same deal we had had in West Morton: rent the house to us until it sold, on the condition that we would keep it clean and in good shape so that it could be shown at any time to prospective buyers. Yes, we swore that we would do exactly that, Reader. (Let’s both try to control our laughter, shall we?)

              “On The Hump?” I asked JT. Say nothing of its being a far cry from our prestigious address in West Morton; the Hump’s reputation preceded it.

              “Who cares, man?” asked JT, wondering, I’m sure, how I could make an issue of residential respectability after growing up in Adolf’s East Morton Trailer Park. “It’s cheaper.”

 It was true that property on the Hump was what one might call “family-priced.” Most sales and rental agreements took place among the Humpsters and their relatives. (Who else, besides our misguided selves, would choose to live there?) The original Hump-dwellers had built their first pre-fab houses back in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, when they moved up from the defunct coal mines of eastern Kentucky to go to work in Morton’s foundries and paper factories. As they prospered and climbed “up The Hump,” they sold or rented their old houses to children, nieces, nephews, and cousins who had followed their path to the Promised Land. Very few outsiders like us ever came to call this hilltop enclave of former mountain-dwellers “home.”

              JT’s father’s client had arrived from Kentucky in the 50s and built his first small house near the bottom of The Hump. When he was promoted to foreman at Puckitt Paper, he sold that home and bought from his uncle the slab house we now lived in, on Coal Street, near the “fashionable” crest of the hill. He remodeled the home, added the family room, and let his wife redecorate (with the devil’s own color scheme). After living just a few years in the resultant turquoise splendor, our landlord became a supervisor, put his second house up for sale, and left the Hump altogether, much to the disgust of his friends and relatives:

              “Got ’im a few dollars in his pocket and got damn uppity, seem like to me.”

              “I knowed his people down home when they didn’t have nary a damn pot to piss in ner a winder to throw it outen, neither, by God.”

              “Money the roota all evil! What the Good Book say!”

              “Praise God!”

              With modern bathroom facilities and windows, the Coal Street house, decorated in decidedly poor taste but still very nice by Hump standards, went on the market. It had a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a pretty decent attic, the ceiling of which was almost high enough at the center for a person to stand up. The added family room at the rear of the house had big wall-to-wall windows and ran the entire width of the structure. One entered this addition either from the kitchen or by an outer door opening onto the concrete walk that skirted the side of the house. When we moved in, JT and I each took one of the bedrooms and made Bo and Bony both sleep in the family room since they had no money to contribute. They were to take care of all household chores until they got real work and paid us back their share of our initial expenditure, which was $450 ($225 monthly rent and $225 security deposit). This was our theoretical agreement, which became increasingly theoretical with each week that passed at 1777.

              Since they never had come up with any cash, I had no qualms about kicking Bo and Bony up into the attic when I “rented” my bedroom to Casper and Very. I had already planned to move my mattress, dresser, and desk into the family room and hang a door to separate my new quarters from the kitchen. I would keep that new door locked and use the outer door as my private entrance, distancing myself from the chaotic traffic that generally filled our house. Whereas I had been up to now the primary host and overseer, I would choose henceforth to emerge occasionally and grace the guests with my presence, but otherwise I would be a mysteriously quiet, maladjusted recluse. I would get my own phone (red, to match my light bulbs) installed back there and isolate myself from the rest of the abode. I even formulated a defense against the onslaught of merciless daylight that poured through the big family room windows in the mornings. These ideas were rolling around in my head by Thanksgiving, so Very’s request that she and Casper be allowed to move in was just the incentive I needed to put my plan into action.

              I immediately ripped down all the straight curtains in the family room and started taping large sheets of aluminum foil over the windows. I was about half finished when my Reynolds Wrap ran out, leaving the room with a light half and a dark half. I placed my mattress in the darkest corner of the dark section and turned my attention to a small interior window through which I could look from the family room into the kitchen. At some time in Hump history, that window, which was directly above the kitchen sink on the other side, must have afforded a person doing dishes (as we were sure someone once had) a sweeping view of our steep, thorny back yard and the peeling storage shed where, during our tenure, we let the Ghost store his hot guns.

              By the time we moved in, though, the family room had been tacked onto the back of the house, and that view of the yard from the kitchen was gone--not a big deal to us, since we never stayed long in the kitchen, anyway. So adept had we become at balancing yet another grimy saucer atop “Mt. Dishmore,” the precarious china volcano rising from the depths of “Greasy Lake” (the stagnant pool of cold, gray water that perpetually lapped the rim of our foul kitchen sink) that it took us only seconds to do so and escape that chamber of household horrors forthwith.

              On those rare days when Mount D did not obscure the little window above the sink, a person standing there to do dishes (as we almost never did) could have looked directly from the kitchen into the former family room, now my new bedroom. Between 5:00 a.m. and noon or so, such a window-peeper would have observed there not a family, but me, with my shoulder-length shag haircut sleep-disheveled as I crashed hiply beneath my tie-dyed, purple-and-orange-sunburst sheet. I’m sure it goes without saying that the mattress upon which I lay was coolly positioned, not between the rails of a middle-class bed frame, but directly upon the floor. I slept as close as possible to the earth, our universal mother and original womb. Why elevate one’s bed with metal rails, anyway? What was the purpose--to allow capitalist furniture dealers to profit from our need for daily rest? Before there were furniture stores or bedframes or beds or bedrooms, didn’t man simply fall to the earth and sleep when he was tired? Why then should we not do the same, hip and freaky Reader? I ask you.     

              Any member or guest of the household who might suddenly hanker for a glimpse of the great outdoors while adding his plate to the stack in the sink needed do no more than turn to his right and look through the larger kitchen window in the exterior wall. By daylight, he would see a miniature forest of tall, green weeds shooting up through the cracks in the concrete walk that ran along the side of the house.  He would also get a good look at our homemade “privacy fence,” a contemporary brown glass structure composed entirely of quart Hudepohl beer bottles that climbed in a great pile to the height of an average man, effectively blocking the sight line between the neighbor’s house and ours.

              The fence had been built, one bottle at a time, largely by our housemate Bo, with assistance from a few of our guests who also imbibed (the minority, actually). Upon draining their last dregs of Hudy, rather than force another bottle into our overflowing trashcan, these beer hounds would simply raise the screen-less kitchen window and toss their empties outdoors--gently, to reduce the chance of breakage. Then they opened more beer if there was more to be opened. Often, I had to remind them to close the window afterward, since they were somehow oblivious to the buzz of invading insects, the sounds of the neighbors’ domestic loving or fighting, and the occasional city rooster’s crowing at dawn, just as I was drifting off to sleep.

              The little window above the sink, though, could not be shut. It had been nailed permanently open--probably when the family room was added. I can no longer picture the curtains on the kitchen side of that small window, but on my family-room side were some flowered eyesores that were not only hideously straight, but also just plain ugly. They had no doubt been hung by the Humplord’s wife, whom we blamed for choosing our carpet, as well, despite rumors we had heard that only men are afflicted by color-blindness.  (JT was one such man, come to think of it; in later years, he would be the proud owner of a deep violet Austin-Marina with a flaming red-orange interior, bought used for a good price since no one else could bear the clashing color scheme).

              I replaced those hideous curtains on my side with a dozen strands of colored glass beads. Then I claw-hammered out the nails that kept the little window always open. The nailer’s idea had been, I suspected, to create a fashionable “serving window” between kitchen and family room. We envisioned a happy Hump housewife of yore serving Maxwell House and marble cake to her neighbors on an early Sunday afternoon in the afterglow of a rousing sermon (say nothing of a little serpent juggling) at the Soul Winner’s Pentecostal Tabernacle of God, just as she had seen families do on TV, albeit with slightly different dialogue:

              “Well bless me all to goodness if Eunice ain’t gone and baked her a scratch cake before church this morning.”

              “She musta got up with the chickens.”

              “No, no, ladies. Hit ain’t nothing but old Betty Crocker.”

              “Well, I’ll swar to goodness me if it don’t taste just like scratch. Don’t it now, Flossy?”

              “Eunice always could bake.”

              “Oh, y’all are kind, but they weren’t no bake to it, really. Do y’all need more coffee?”

              “Just a drop for me, Honey. Pass it right on through ye little winder thar.”

              “Ain’t that the handiest little winder you ever did see?”    

              Since those of us living at 1777 Coal Street in late 1969 did not drink coffee (we had other means of staying awake), about all we ever “served” through that window was a passing joint, which required more dexterity than one might think, depending upon the height of Mt. Dishmore that day. If Mt. D had risen to mid-window or higher, the household member standing in the kitchen had to lift a few dirty plates off the top with one hand, pass the m*******a through the window with the other, then carefully replace the crest of the china mountain, standing back in case there should be an unexpected dish-slide that might splash the still, oily, gray water of Greasy Lake onto his pristine purple corduroy bell-bottoms, his fringed buckskin jacket, or--G/god forbid--his white suede platform shoes. After a while, we realized it was less trouble just to walk through the kitchen doorway into the family room and hand the joint to whoever was next, rather than screw around with the cute little serving window just because it was there. We were trying to escape Beaver Cleaver’s house, after all, not move into it.

              I closed the window, hammered the bent nails straight, and nailed the window shut for the foreseeable future. That was at the end of November 1969. By New Year’s Eve, I still hadn’t gotten around to covering the little window—nor the rest of the big windows--with more foil, so I was able to see, through my hip new window treatment, as I lay almost asleep beneath my purple-and-orange sheet that night, the beginnings of real trouble at 1777. It was not the trouble we’d expected after the paper-covered rock (still on the floor next to my mattress) had crashed through the window a week earlier. Nor was it our unexpected trouble with Casper and Very, who were by then established (with only a mattress for furniture) in my former bedroom. Either of those two crises--or any of the others that befell us during our brief and sordid sojourn on The Hump--would have been a welcome alternative to the trouble that was actually afoot that night in our house, which up to that point we had considered a freaky oasis of peace and love in the pitiably straight desert that was our town of birth. Everything changed that New Year’s Eve, though, and today, when I look back to 1777 Coal Street, East Morton, Ohio, in 1969-70, I see a doomed, desolate, and depraved hippie hellhole that we Greased Morton wannabe freaks, for a few mind-numbing months, called “home.”

              Ironically enough, my primary reason for sequestering myself back in the family room had been to avoid trouble, to isolate myself from the herd, to get away from the human traffic that swarmed surrealistically through the rooms and hallways of our residence, to create for myself a pocket of serenity in the midst of the psychedelic chaos I had done more than my share to foster. I felt cool playing the role of the hip hermit in our freaky little “family,” but I like to think that I secluded myself also because I was beginning to learn one of life’s very important lessons. Although it would take me a good twenty years more to accept and live by the rule of which I speak (and by then it would be far too late), I think it’s fair to say I was starting to see, even at the tender age of 18 in 1969, that “fun,” if one should ever get his fill of it, might turn out to be an extremely overrated concept--that it might actually be possible to have “too much fun.” 

              “Starting to see,” I said, dear Reader. You may rest assured we were yet working hard to have our share of fun while it was, in fact, still fun. Every pot-smoking, sopor-eating, acid-dropping, speed-freak teenager in East Morton (and West Morton, too) who lived with his or her parents found 1777 Coal Street a paradise on earth in the late fall/early winter of 1969-70. By the time we’d lived there a month and a half, the place was a transient flophouse, nightclub, and pharmacy rolled into one. We lacked only a revolving door and a neon sign proclaiming “s*x, Drugs, Rock & Roll—Walk-ins Welcome!” Every known guest seemed to invite one or more unknown guests, and word-of-mouth advertising spread until we didn’t know half the people smoking, speeding, tripping, balling, and crashing under our roof. Before it was over, freaks were coming all the way from Cincinnati and even northern Kentucky to our little house on The Hump in Greased Morton, Ohio, believe it or not.

              More than once before I moved into the family room, I came home to find my friend and “business partner” Ghost Stevens on the mattress in my bedroom with some stoned chick from Calhoun Street in Clifton (Cincinnati’s humble answer to the Haight in San Francisco), who had to ball the Ghost to pay off an outstanding dope bill--or maybe just to establish credit.

              The Ghost was the first of our contemporaries to graduate, as consumer and provider, from pot, diet pills, sopors, and acid to more serious drugs. Since he didn’t really live anywhere (he had some clothes in his car and some at his parents’ house), he occasionally brought female clients in arrears to good old 1777 to rectify their accounts. He was also a freaky thief who occasionally robbed a gas station or pawnshop when the drug business was slack, storing stolen guns and other such merchandise in our backyard shed while he sought reliable buyers.         

              Following one late-night heist, he had brought a stash of weapons back to the house in the early hours of the morning, after we’d all crashed. Light was just starting to violate my windows that day when I awoke to the sound of a muted “click.” It wasn’t too loud, but I seemed to feel the vibration of the sound as well as hear it. When I opened my eyes, the muzzle of a rifle was resting on the bridge of my nose, the steel barrel stretching away toward the giggling face of the Ghost. “April Fool!” he laughed though it was not spring. Fortunately for us all, I was too sleepy and too big a peace-loving hippie to give him the “good morning” he deserved.

              Nor did I get angry when the Ghost borrowed my bed. Selfish by nature though I was, I had to follow the hip credo of sharing all I had with my “brother” in peace, who didn’t borrow the bed that often. He conducted most of his business in Cincinnati, where he would spring for a $10 room at the Clifton Motel, near the university, when the drug trade was brisk. When it was slow, and he opted to spend instead the dollar in gas and one hour on the highway that would get him back to East Morton and a free bed at our house, he always offered me “seconds” with any slow-paying debtor he brought to my boudoir. (I was, after all, his major stock holder, investing a part of each month’s SS check in the Ghost’s business in hopes of reaping a modest profit.) I generally declined such offers, not out of any squeamishness over the young woman’s drug use or fear of any disease (we were immortal in those days, and those of us left alive still are), but because even then I could see that women who used serious drugs spent all their money on--what else?--serious drugs, and that they had nothing left to spend on clothes or shoes, let alone on cosmetics or fragrances. In that bra-burning era that exalted all things natural, although I made it my business to be the hippest of the hip, still an unpainted, unscented, and unadorned woman left me pretty much uninterested. I just wasn’t as ready to admit it then as I am now. I was conflicted by my need to be the freakiest of the natural freaks, on the one hand, and my blossoming penchant for exotically garbed women on the other. A year before, I might have “plunged ahead” (the first of many shameless double entendres, I’m afraid, Reader) with any and all of the Ghost’s female clientele, but by the end of 1969, I think I was in the process of learning yet another hard lesson in a young man’s life: no s*x is better than bad s*x.

              “In the process,” I said, Reader. I will not claim that I never sampled (or attempted to sample) the less-than-dazzling charms of a midnight credit applicant already supine and enstupored upon my pallet of communal love. I was, after all, a supremely cool, long-haired, rakishly dressed, happily unemployed, free-spirited 18-year-old male in the year 1969, living unsupervised among other similar youths, drunk on the nectar of simply being that age at that golden and glorious time. Surely, kind Reader, you cannot hold me accountable for my transgressions during that chapter of history. Who knows what you, upright and responsible citizen that you no doubt are today, might have done had you been living my life then?

              Anyway, in the borrowed-bed department, my housemate JT, with whom I ruled the roost at 1777, had it much worse than I did. He was on third shift at Ohio Asbestos, a little factory out in rural Farmcrest. After working all night, from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., actually doing strenuous physical labor of a type the rest of us could not even imagine, he deserved to sleep much more than we did. Yet his nightly schedule made him that much less likely than we to get his needed rest. Since he got off work an hour or two after the climax (“crash-and-ball time”) of the nightly festivities at 1777, JT returned home at least once (or twice) a week to find that a couple (or two) had already claimed his empty sleeping space and was (or were) enjoying the passed-out afterglow (or the actual throes, if they had gotten a late start) of drug-inspired love therein. “Ahh, s**t!” I would hear him yell at such times.

              Not that he was ungenerous. JT would offer food, lodging, music, and/or drugs to anyone in need, but after a long night of honest-to-G/god toil among the country cousins of our Hump-dwelling urban hillbilly neighbors, he was in the mood for slumber. More than physically demanding, his job was stressful, largely because his straight, brown, shoulder-length tresses were one of the main topics of conversation (right up there with coon huntin’, car racin’, beer drinkin’, and p***y eatin’) among his co-workers each and every night of the week, month after month after month:

              “Hey, Cleetus, don’tcha thank JT need him some ‘em are Spoolies, put a little curl in ‘is har?”

              “Ah’ll swar it’s straighter’n a old stove poker, ain’t it? What is it he need?

              “You know, ‘em Spoolies, little pank, rubbery—”

              “‘Pank and rubbery’? Now’at sound like some poontang to me, son! I eat that s**t with a spoon!”

              “Naw, naw, Cleetus, they’s fer ye har, ye old woman’s har, lahk curlers, fer the curl, ya know?”

              “I know ‘em hippie girls don’ take no baths. Hippie religion don’t ‘low it. Don’t that poontang stank when ya eat it, JT?”

              “They’s all on dope, Cleetus. Cain’t smail nothin’ no way. Noses is all shot from the dope. Don’t matter whut it smail lahk, do it, JT?

              And so on and so on, nightly. How JT bore up under such torture is beyond me. In the morning, his brown-and-whites worn off and his nerves frazzled, he needed sleep. By dawn, however, all flat surfaces at 1777 were usually occupied by the unconscious and/or amorous, or sometimes by one of each: a horny speed freak or crashing acid-head, for example, capping off the night’s festivities by making frenzied love to a blissfully semi-conscious sopor queen as limp as a rag doll. (Household lore held that if her eyelids fluttered open, even a fraction of an inch, as her partner reached his moment of greatest passion, she too had definitely achieved orgasm in the depths of her coma.)

              Were the gender roles in such a scenario ever reversed, Reader? Did a wired-up member of the fairer s*x ever fellate to erection, mount, and have her deviant way at dawn with a helplessly comatose male drug abuser (of whom there was no shortage)? Did such a lusty damsel then watch for her mate’s lashes to flutter as she gasped in ecstasy upon his numbly rigid tool of love? Well, anything was possible at 1777 Coal Street, and you may conjure up what mental images you like. Please pardon me if I choose not to join you. The memories of what I literally saw there are indelibly imprinted upon my brain and sufficient to last a lifetime.

              So, JT counted on his own bed in which to lie down when he got home from work in the morning. If he found it occupied, he not only had to arouse (no mean task with downer freaks) and eject the guests sleeping there; since he was the most fastidious among us, he felt compelled to change the sheets, as well, before he could go to bed himself. He was not fastidious enough, however, to keep a clean set of sheets on hand at all times. Thus, after working all night in the asbestos factory, he might be required to do laundry around 7:30 a.m. at Mamaw’s Washtub, next to the King Kwik Minit Market on the crest of The Hump.

              More often than not, he would say, “f**k it!” very loudly, leave the guests in his bed and come into my room to crash on the floor. When he woke up in the afternoon, his own mattress generally would have been vacated. Had it not, he would begin roughly pulling his bedding off and out from under the uninvited sleeper(s). The male might remain undisturbed during his eviction, but by that time the drugs of the (sometimes) more temperate female had generally worn off to the extent that she could sense she was naked in a room she did not quite recognize. Motivated by this dawning awareness (one hoped), she would wake her lover (whom she might or might not recognize) and request his assistance in a casual search for the bell-bottom jeans and tie-dyed halter-top of which he had relieved her the night before.  

              I never objected to JT’s crashing in my room. Even when Stoni spent the night, our sad attempts at the act of love had certainly ceased by the hour when he arrived. He would have welcomed me into his room, Faith or no Faith, were the situation reversed. Come to think of it, the two of them--he and Faith--probably saved my life one night that winter by interrupting their own bedroom frolicking to take me to the hospital after Bo had cracked me over the head with a quart beer bottle (more about this incident later, Reader). The point is that JT was a good friend, always ready to help anyone in need, whereas I was not especially generous or compassionate. Perhaps I was just a selfish, egotistical bastard by nature (you may be nodding vigorously at this point, judgmental Reader), but I prefer to think the difference in our respective characters was due to the contrast between our backgrounds. While I had spent my formative years under the tutelage of a psychotic mother in Adolf’s East Morton Trailer Park, JT had grown up in a real house with halfway normal parents, two sisters, and a dog named Charlie Brown. He had no reason to be rebellious or maladjusted. He just was. To be otherwise would have been completely uncool, after all, would it have not?

             Speaking of JT’s Cleaverish family, his little sister Chelsea, 16 at the time, regularly delivered food sent us by her mother from the family kitchen. For some reason, JT’s mom thought that Donut Gems, blocks of carob, and Constant Comment tea failed to provide the nutrition we needed to thrive in our humble abode, so she made for us, among other things, fantastic salads with extra tomatoes just for me.  Chelsea, with her new and freshly laminated driver’s license, would haul said comestibles to Coal Street in her dad’s big yellow Plymouth, but she had to hand them in through our door. She was forbidden by her mother to enter the sin-soaked confines of 1777, lest she be instantly corrupted by the essence of the evil goings-on therein. (The veritable smell of depravity did hang in the air, Reader; of that I can assure you.) JT’s mother couldn’t have known exactly what we were doing in that den of iniquity, but of course she had a better idea than we, in our cool and youthful ignorance, thought she did.

              Her daughter Chelsea, though a straight-A student, church youth-group leader, and high-ranking Girl Scout, was in awe of her freaky big brother’s hip lifestyle. Passing us her mother’s delicious tuna casseroles and blackberry cobblers, the little sister would peer with curiosity into the black recesses of our house. (We never opened the drapes; I don’t know which we feared more: the neighbors’ peeping through our windows to see what freaky evils lurked within--or observing for ourselves what the place actually looked like by the light of day. 1777 was the kind of home that put its best foot forward in the dim glow of candlelight and lava lamp, 24/7.)

              JT and I both enforced the no-Chelsea-in-the-house rule rigidly, not so much to protect his little sister as to prevent her from reporting anything she might witness back to her mom. Whatever our reasons, we can say honestly today that we guarded at least one teenage girl against the moral contamination breeding inside our foul nest of degeneracy in that era of peace, hitchhikers, and “free love”; however, Reader, before you give us too much credit for the strong moral fiber underlying our crazed hippie exteriors, please be assured that we did on occasion let other under-aged females into the house. No, we did not ask for I.D. before plying such adolescents with the substances of the day; and, yes, by ingesting said substances they did earn all the rights appertaining thereto, as did the older women (18 to 20) around the house. In short, a happily high 15-year-old did sometimes find herself between the tie-dyed sheets of love at old 1777.  (Bo’s Little Esther was still looking forward to fifteen during the Coal Street period.) But these girls were not related by blood to any of us (as far as we knew), and I, at least, always inquired as to the contraceptive practices of any female entering my red-lit bedchamber. (Planned Parenthood and the Cincinnati Free Clinic by that time had made birth control pills readily available to females of any age, and it was encouraging to see how many young people regularly skipped school and made the trip down I-75 to promote the cause of zero population growth—a cause that has, unfortunately, fallen by the wayside in the new millennium.)

              Oh, it sounds worse than it was, Reader. Barely of legal age ourselves, we all loved one other in those days, and s*x was often just an expression of the love between opposite-gender friends, a positive experience that could be shared by freaks of all ages and descriptions without the Establishment encumbrances of “commitment” and “marriage,” which words were regarded by us as the most shocking of obscenities. None of these aspiring young “hippettes” (if you’ll pardon a little politically incorrect lingo here in the 21st century) ran screaming to Mom or the authorities after being initiated into our little circle of love. Who’s to say we were their “firsts,” anyway? Most came back to 1777 on ensuing nights for more s*x, more drugs, more rock and roll--no, not necessarily in that order: We would always pass a nubile young guest a joint or half a sopor and put on a little Crosby, Stills, & Nash before divesting her of her hip-huggers, for heaven’s sake. We did not force her to take us on in turns. We did not make movies or even take still photographs of her as she writhed in drug-crazed, teenage passion. (Casper and Very had probably stolen our camera, anyway, if we had one in the house to begin with.) We were many things, Reader, but we were neither brutes nor child molesters!       

              So, we never let Chelsea into the house. We understood that her mother quietly disapproved of our lifestyle. (Who in his right mind would not have? I disapproved of it even as I lived it.) While JT’s dad was all for our getting out on our own, “sewing our wild oats and living life to the fullest,” his mother never missed a chance to remind us that we were letting our hair be our G/god. “You boys are letting your hair be your god,” she would say at every opportunity. (She was much more religious than JT’s father though he was the minister in the family.) Still, she did all she could to help us despite the scene I had made in her living room during our last year of high school. She was a good woman and a good mother though, of course, I didn’t know it at the time. (What standard did I have by which to judge? I ask you, Reader.)

              For example, I couldn’t understand why she got so bent out of shape when her morning phone calls to 1777 were answered by the slurred voice of the female guest who had passed out nearest the phone the night before, who might not know in just whose house she had awakened, and who generally responded groggily and with residual, drug-induced confusion to the mother’s polite request to speak with her son:

              “Hello? Is JT there, please?”

              “Oh, wow. It’s like, early, right? You wanna talk to, uh, ‘JT?’ You mean, like . . . James Taylor? That’s far out, Lady, but I don’t think ‘JT’ is up yet, and neither am I. Do you know what I want when I do wake up? I want some of whatever YOU took last night. Then I wanna ball Jim Morrison with his leather pants down, like onstage at the Fillmore West, right? Then I want Jimi Hendrix to set his guitar on fire and give me head while the flames engulf us at Monterey. ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky!’ ‘Forget that sky, Jimi, and kiss my c**t instead!’  . . . Oh, wow, I must still be tripping! But dig it, Mrs. . . . Uh . . . If I’m still high when the sun comes up, I always do like half a sopor and go right to bed. That’s what you gotta do. You’ll crash a few hours, then you call us back. Or, you know, just come on over. Maybe ‘JT’ will be here, right? [Here there might be a snicker and a stifled yawn.] Or you could just rap with his brother Livingston! We’ll get high and look at Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart pictures. I’ve got magazines.”

              “But JT is my—”

              “It’ll be far out. Peace.” Click.      

              As I’ve said, though, neither phone communication with the outside world, nor our nutritional issues, nor Casper and Very, nor even our racist, inbred neighbors constituted our greatest problem on Coal Street during the fall and winter holiday season of 1969. Our greatest problem, which arose on the very last day of the year, started with several circles of bright, colored light. I saw them as I lay nude (pajamas were not appropriate sleep apparel for the truly hip, and we had long since abandoned underwear altogether) beneath the purple-and-orange, tie-dyed sheet atop my mattress on the floor in the family room. Actually, it was no longer New Year’s Eve. It was about 3:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day, but we at 1777 went by the theory that the day wasn’t over until we all had crashed, and there were still a few in our house that night who had yet to do so.

        Some of those residents and guests were no doubt lying abed, as I was, watching lights and images dance before their eyes, as well, but those folks were enjoying harmless hallucinations due to ingestion of one substance or another that night. I wished that I, too, were hallucinating, but I knew that I was not. I had smoked a little pot on the way to and from Reflections, but I did not drink or do psychedelics, so I knew that the lights I was seeing were real. They shone from the kitchen through the little serving window, throwing Mt. Dishmore into shadow and changing colors as they played through the red, blue, and amber beads hung on my side. Maybe the weed I’d smoked had been “treated,” like the stuff Storm had had the first time I’d ever gotten off on grass. Maybe there really were no lights: wishful thinking, Reader. Those shining circles were there, but what they could mean I did not know. If I had, I would have chosen another quart beer bottle over the head and another six stitches or a rock through the window every night for the next year or another pair of housemates like Casper and Very or endless hell-like continuation of any of the other tragedies we suffered on Coal Street--rather than face what lay immediately ahead.