Mystic Eyes, Twentieth-Century Boy

I think back on the private boys’ school I went to. They tried to break me. Those bastards. They whacked me with oak boards and gave me noogies. My homosexual Latin teacher twisted my ear around because my conjugation lacked something. I had lead ashtrays pitched at my head. I was shoved into a gym locker and hammered upon. I came onto mescaline in French class. I wrote hundreds of sentences beginning with “I will not…” I wheezed during soccer practice. It was crushing me. Now I’m free. Adrift in a huge public high school where very little is demanded of me.

I just got done jamming with my band, the Hurricane Boys. We did “Boris the Spider,” “Run Run Run,” “Communication Breakdown,” “I’m So Glad,” “I’m a Man,” “Stormy Weather.” I felt invincible behind my set of silver-sparkle Ludwigs. Cutting through dense layers of Gibson guitars, leading, following, patterns lock in, my head spins, and a rush swoops up from my toes to my crossed eyes. Sounds great, and it’s coming from us!

Driving back home past nighttime-neon suburbia, Tom Thumb, the Little General, Nate’s Food Market, Snuffy’s Drive-In, Smack’s Hamburgers, Quik Mart, Dairy Queen, Pee Wee’s Big Fish, the A&W, the 7-Hi, Hart’s Cafe, listening to Clapton on the radio, the car full of crazy longhairs, a working unit, one feeding off of the other, observing, pretending, babbling, goofing. We’re on the way to somewhere, picking up, dropping off.

I think of fifteen-year-old Honey Sullivan. Last December she got shipped back to her mother’s house in Dixie County, Missouri. She was only here for a few months after some trouble back home. Honey had been one of those precocious kids who would be the only girl in an all-boy club and do a striptease for them in a treehouse. Never had a dad. She was hot to trot. She’d been shown the ropes by some pool shark/drug dealer ten years her senior for one entire summer. Our first kiss was in Loring Park. After smoking a joint and watching the ducks, we rolled around by the flower beds. All tongues and suction. We break for air, and she says in her southern accent, “I knew you’d kiss like that.” I thought to myself, “I never kissed like that in my life!” We made out till midnight. She said, “Next week I want to make love to you.”

I remember her big eyes looking up at me in the school hallways as she grinned and said, “Hello, boy,” hungry for the nights of passion to come. She is two years younger than me but much more sexually advanced. I remember her back as she undid her white brassiere and then turned to me where I lay. An indelible sight I replay over and over in my head. Perfect breasts jutting out, downy soft and pink-tipped. Fawn-colored fluffy pubis. Arching up her limbs to me like a sensuous cat who wants to be petted and stroked…her creamy flat stomach…her hair smelled honey-sweet. For real.

Once in my parents’ house (they were in Europe), listening to the Beatles’ “I Want You,” and she was getting all worked up. “She’s so heavy,” sang John. “C’mon, Dunc,” pleaded Honey. I was nervous that my aunt was going to drop in to water the plants or something, even though it was eight o’clock on a school night. So we climb the wooden stairs to the small loft over the living room, where there is a divan to fool around on. Off come my pants and boxer shorts, off come her brown tights. On goes the Sheik prophylactic I stole from my dad’s bathroom drawer. She presents her beautiful ass to me as she grips the banister; I position myself down between her buttocks, rake the silky slope of her thighs, enter the maiden hair. I am nervous, thinking we don’t have much time, so I’m going at it pretty fast. Honey looks back over her shoulder at me and says in that southern drawl of hers, “Hey, where’s the fire?” We laughed, and I slowed down and savored just what it was we were doing. She’s open to me, thrusting back, skin to skin. Riding the dark waves, coming nearer and nearer, and then in a soft, shuddering convulsion she was gone, and so was I, melting in exquisite delight.

She once passed me a note in the library, written in her kid’s loopy block letters, reading, “I want a butt fuck!,” and I blushed and laughed, thinking, “Who does that, anyway?!?” But of course she was serious, probably having tried most things with her ex-boyfriend, who was now serving time in prison for dealing drugs. I remember another time in a college kid’s apartment, a bunch of older freaks were getting high listening to Abbey Road solemnly. She knelt next to me, smoking, gently rearranging her limbs under her miniskirt every so often, playing with the cat. We crawled out of sight onto the kitchen floor, where we writhed about together and French-kissed, getting thoroughly excited, sexual stimulation being her favored emotional state. “I want you,” she whispered. “Here? Now? What about all these people?” “We can go in the bathroom…C’mon…I need you inside me.” And I didn’t do it! Idiot! I stood on propriety! What a dolt! I dropped off a very unsatisfied girl at her sister’s house and drove home with blue balls. She was a nympho-schoolgirl from ear to sweet southern ear.

I’m haunted by her now. I dreamt she was in a production of Peter Pan. I have another recurring dream where I ride an orange school bus to a lake. And she’s there. The shimmering lake is surrounded by irregular cliffs, making it dark, romantic, and spooky. She’s incredibly sexy, sitting upright, an insistent little girl, waiting to be kissed and fondled. She says, “Little teapots take time.” We embrace. I never, ever, have sex in my dreams, sadly, so that was the end. After her the rest don’t seem right. So that’s why I’m haunted.

Jefferson Airplane at the Minneapolis Auditorium. Kurt and I dropped mescaline and smoked a lot of boo for the show. Ten thousand freaks were there, tons of hippie babes that were beautiful and I fell in love with them all, grinning like mad. The place was buzzing and so was I. Everyone out of their heads for the occasion. Anticipation for San Francisco’s finest! Lights go down, joints are passed. First they show a movie of the Airplane at various be-ins, love-ins, and we forget what we’re seeing, “Is this the Airplane?” we laugh. Then the screen rolls up, blue Fender amp glow, and it’s the chugging intro to “Volunteers.” This is the Airplane. Transfixed by the light show, lysergic tunnels opening up. I stood on my chair with everyone else. A sea of rocking heads. They had us, were directing our trip with buzz-saw currents, guitars slashing, thrashing, slinging lightning bolts, improvising space music, drifting off and fading together, “Feed your head!” Grace wails. Total professionals guiding us through the people’s music.

Afterwards, when the band left, and the houselights came on, we all looked at each other, minds blown, new knowledge on people’s faces. We all saw the same thing, heard the same thing, felt the same thing. Unified. Strengthening our resolve to let our freak flags fly. There is a revolution!

In the cold parking lot, I find my mother’s blue Buick station wagon, and the gang climbs in. I reach to turn on the radio, and Kurt says, “Wait, Dunc…what if it’s not the Jefferson Airplane?!?”

So I switch it on, and of course it is the Jefferson Airplane. What else could it be?

I drive everyone home, we’re all drained from the experience, the black sky of Minneapolis winter whipping past at 60 mph. Someone in the backseat says, “Yay, Dunc, for staying on the road!” Instantaneous applause from all the stoned teenagers.

Saw Roland Kirk at the ExtraOrdinaire on Lake Street. We were the only white kids in there. He was blind and played two horns at the same time.

More Concerts

Rod Stewart and the Faces ( the Labor Temple)

Tony Williams Lifetime with Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, Larry Young (same)

Traffic (Mpls. Auditorium)

The Who (ditto)

The Mothers of Invention, with Aynsley Dunbar and Jeff Simmons (Guthrie)

Blodwyn Pig (The Depot)

Likes

Robin Hood and his Merry Men

Count Felix von Luckner, the Sea Devil

Ghost stories

Tarzan

Procul Harum

Nipples

Dracula

King Crimson

The Nice

Richard Halliburton

Flash Gordon

The Shadow

Paul Butterfield Band

Zap Comix

Larry Coryell

Laura Nyro

Fu Manchu

Terry Reid

Free

Susannah York

LeRoi Jones

Soft Machine

Riding on Tommy Haskells’s dad’s cabin cruiser on Lake Minnetonka. I lie on the prow, stoned on the good grass he got from those hoods at Excelsior Amusement Park. Endless shoreline projection, green and gray. Stereo booms Hendrix on the lake. Axis: Bold as Love. The boathouse is our HQ. Sometimes we sit in there and watch the rain. Listen to thunder. Someone brought a cute girl with wire-rims and a gray velvet bikini. I loved her! She swam under my legs. It’s all in a dream.

In the past three days, my mother has discovered…my roach clip…my pack of Pall Malls…a paperback entitled Drive-In Nympho. I told her I smoke dope. We really haven’t talked much lately. I always have something to hide. Forced into a double life. Mom said she found my sleepover pal, Tommy, “in a condition that couldn’t have been more zonked out!” True enough, we smoke marijuana three or four times a weekday.

I’m going to summer school at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. My past knowledge doesn’t count for much. I’m in a new pool with a bunch of strange kids, all the best in their class. My teacher had a band in San Francisco called Fifty Foot Hose. He wired the Merry Pranksters’ bus! He says I look like Stevie Winwood (one of my favorite English rock stars). He urges me to talk in stream of consciousness. That comes rather naturally. They are trying to teach us to express our personality in line and paint. But some of these yokels have no personality to translate. You gotta live your art. Go to where the extremes lead you. That’s my credo.

After school we sometimes meet at a little secluded park in Kenwood called 7 Pools. Me and the boys sometimes call it “the Palace of Piss” because it’s the first thing we do on arrival, unzip and perform “circulars” or “swordfights.” We can hear the symphony of a distant train coming to a halt. Screech.

I’m ushering at the Guthrie Theater. The Mothers play. There’s a party for them after at Sue Weill’s modernist house. Flo and Eddie (backup singers, used to be in the Turtles) ask if I’ve got any weed. I do, so we retire to the garage to toke up. Zappa disapproves of drugs, so they gotta be careful. Back inside, harpist Tony Glover looks menacing. Spider John Koerner comes in looking dazed, bony shoulders up high. Aynsley Dunbar asks me why there is tape on my fingers. “ ’Cause I’m a drummer, like you!” We talk drums.

A fellow usher tells me he flunked his draft physical by putting peanut butter up his ass, and snacking on it as he stood in the line. Offered some to the man in charge. 4-F baby!

Been hanging around with an art-school girl with the poetic name of Robin. A Pre-Raphaelite from St. Paul. Kind of Greek goddessy. Almond eyes, hooded eyelids. A long, tangled mass of Medusa-like brown hair. She wears minuscule wide-wale beige shorts and tight T-shirt tops. We went skinny-dipping off the boathouse, both very shy. We peeked at each other. Her upper lip curls, her eyes flash all over my face. She’s coy and naturally loony. She says she’s afraid to get too attached to me because I might leave. We go to Lake of the Isles one summer night, lie under the trees and finally start to initiate the heavy-petting part of the deal. Five-finger shuffle. Eager, hungry, moaning, sighing, hot breath in my ear. I was messing with her peach T-shirt and the tits inside. Sliding my hand into her cutoffs, where there is a multitude of hair. Now I can smell her natural fragrance on my fingers. But she keeps freaking out, saying, “What are you doing!?!” and bursting into screams and sobs. I try to soothe her, but she’s kind of nuts.

I flew to NYC to visit my sister, who lives above Uncle Hugo’s bar on Columbus Avenue. She’s working for Houghton Mifflin. Tommy is in NYC too, staying with his beautiful blond older sister, Ellie, who I first got high with, who always knew what was cool before we did. She reads my horoscope. She says I’m a perfectionist at lovemaking, friendly at it. I look for cleanliness and modesty in a woman (she says). Only a natural woman will do. She’s into cocaine and Tantric sex now with some mysterious older guru guy.

Tommy and I go see Charles Mingus at Top of the Gate on Bleecker Street. Take the subway back uptown. Smoke pot in the nighttime park we have been warned against. A gang of Puerto Ricans stop in the gully below us. Danger! I put the joint out with spit. We are quiet. They are listening, looking for intruders in their domain. They sense us, smell the lingering pot, but cannot find us in the darkness.

Our hearts pound. To be discovered would mean sudden death, we’d been told. They finally moved on, and we scrambled over the wall to the relative safety of Central Park West.

Holly and I took the bus to Newport to visit her husband, Barrs. We passed right through Harlem, and I spied Smalls Paradise from the window. I love New York.

Meanwhile, Tommy got robbed. I went to the Museum of Modern Art, and liked Pavel Tchelitchew’s Hide-and-Seek. Plus Kirchner’s Street, Dresden. I met a fashion model named Penny who asked where I was from. “Minnesota,” I replied shyly. “Is that in the United States?” She also asked if I was a leg or breast man. She asked if I was a writer and I thought for a while and said yes, and she said, “If you had said no I wouldn’t have believed you.”

Also an impeccably dressed forty-year-old Frenchman took me under his wing and bought me a coffee at Zum Zum. He told me about coming here with an older woman who looked up at the sausages hanging from the ceiling and said, “I wish my husband had one of those.” He gave me his card. They sure carry on in this city.

I had a college interview at Bard today. Was picked up at the Rhinecliff train station by a hippie on a motorcycle, who told me he wasn’t really a freak. I told the Bard interviewer that I tied buildings up with string (a lie). He seemed impressed. Bard was all very green and ivy covered. Perched on a cliff over the mighty Hudson.

August 6th. Went to an all-day rock show at Shea Stadium. Paul Butterfield, Al Kooper, the Rascals, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, etc.

I also went to the Fillmore East, that hallowed hall where history has been made. Loved the long-haired ushers in their green baseball jerseys. Saw Brian Auger with Julie Driscoll and the headliners, Steppenwolf. The bass player, Nick St. Nicholas, wore bunny ears and a jock strap. Period. I was most impressed.

My last night, Holly let me venture to Seventieth and Amsterdam Avenue, to a basement rock club called Ungano’s, whose ads I had perused in the alternative press, like Cheetah, Eye, Creem, Crawdaddy, and Ramparts. I knew the Stooges had played there. Inside it was covered with industrial gray carpet, and the clientele was indeed fabulous. The openers, Chicken Shack, were a first-rate British blues ensemble, led by the charismatic and self-effacing Stan Webb, he of the fast fingers and foghorn voice. The headliners were the Tony Williams Lifetime, with Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, and Larry Young. Tony sat behind his set of yellow drums and produced polyrhythms that seemed truly impossible. Each of his limbs had a mind of its own, and he sang plaintively over the top, as if it wasn’t him that was creating the percussive thunder underneath. I remember reading a Downbeat interview with him where he was asked why Miles Davis hired him when he was only seventeen. “Because I was that good,” he replied. When asked why he left that famous quintet to form his own group when he was twenty-four, he replied again, “Because I am that good.” He is the epitome of cool.

Back in Minneapolis. Just heard Honey Sullivan is pregnant from her jailbird boyfriend, who’s behind bars again. Only sixteen, just a baby herself. She wanted us to stay together, to run away on a Greyhound bus, but I knew I had a bright future in front of me, and she didn’t. I dreamt of her at a train station in a green dress, green tights, and little black waitress shoes. I was amazed at her beauty, her innocent strength, her uplifted chin. I was trying to get her to look into my eyes, trying to embrace her, to keep her forever. But she was crying.

Mom left an article on my desk, about how “pot makes people reckless and your child will come home injured.” When I saw it I had a fresh fat lip from some pot-induced shenanigans.

I bought a tab from an usher I work with. He told me it was special, to take it alone, in the country, and to focus on positive thinking and mind over matter. I assured him I was a “head,” no stranger to psychedelics, having tripped over fifty times. He said this acid was made by monks on a mountaintop, and would give me the third eye of awareness. “Don’t underestimate the power of this pill!” he cautioned.

So, Sunday I drive my mom’s navy blue Opel wagon out to Hidden Valley, park the car, walk through the concrete tunnel to the magical bowl within. The drug was coming on real strong. Maybe that freak was right. On the crest of the cliff I could see King Arthur and his knights galloping along, followed by two brontosauruses. I bowed my head and slipped into the depths of time/no time. All the sounds around seemed to have a new meaning. My mind unwound itself, filters off! I could dream an elaborate dream in seconds flat, multidimensional brain films that seemed to take hours but only took minutes. I kept looking at my watch to try to gauge what the hell was going on. Walking through purple reeds and green shoots. I crouch, background becomes foreground, fractured Kathmandu. Sky hauling. Wave after wave of overheated scenarios wash over me. The answer to it all is everything is invading! Petula Clark flashes before my spiral eyes. Crickets talk about septic envelopments. Carol Lynley smiles down from a cloud. Everything is everything. Time doesn’t exist. The back of my mind has shifted to the front. The duality of things. Whiz bang!

I decided I’d better cool it down, so sat down in a creek bed. Then I felt the heartbeat of the earth, slowly at first, then gaining. Mother Earth! She is a woman! Our beats were in sync. I started to get turned on. The sun shining down, the planet undulating beneath me. I had a full-on erection. Nothing would do but to unzip my jeans, roll over on my front, dig a little womb in the mud, and slip it in. This I did. I began to fuck the earth, and lo and behold, the earth began to fuck back, rockin’ this way and that. I’m taking cues from the swelling ground beneath me, enveloping me with her goodness. Why had I never tried this before? I ground down into her welcoming core one last time, and had a shuddering ejaculation.

I rested in the pulsing afterglow…then, realizing what I had done, pulled out, and looked at my little mud cunt, with the sad deposit of my pearly seed within. Looked at my scraped, dirty cock. “You’ve gone mad!” I thought. “Get it together, Dunc.”

Then I tried to scale a cliff. Using positive thinking: “I can I can I can.” Bad idea. I couldn’t. Almost killed myself. I drifted from the bottom of the sea, to the bottom of time, to the bottom of pleasure. Sound turned into color, perceptions intermingling. I could taste shapes. Synesthesia.

I walked up the valley slopes till the whole greenness was in front of me. There was a moving speck in the distance. It was headed toward me. It was human. It was a grubby sixteen-year-old pimpled farm boy with no chin and buck teeth. He wore an aquamarine T-shirt with white trim. As he ascended the hill, he eyed me with some trepidation. Here I was, badly sunburned, in a filthy white shirt, eyes as big as saucers, all by myself in the middle of nowhere. He said, “Hey, man, whatcha doin’?”

He sat by me and gave me some cheap sweet wine from a jug he carried. I lit up a joint and passed it to him, and we began to talk. He was depressed because of women, he explained. He had a shaky hand (he showed me) and when girls asked him what’s with his hand, he says it’s cuz he’s horny for them. That wasn’t going over too well with the ladies. I gave him some sage advice. I was beginning to feel a little more my old self, thanks to this cretin. We smoked another, drank some more of the putrid wine. Then I realized I had to work tonight, for a Leon Russell concert at the Guthrie! I had to be there in an hour! The whole day had whizzed by! We bid our farewells, and I descended down the valley, past the creek bed I fucked (pregnant now with a small planet?), and into the tunnel that would lead me to my car.

Could I drive? I had no depth perception and kept getting mesmerized by the least little thing. Mind over matter, that’s what the man said. I began my journey from Eden into the big, bad city. I had to avoid getting transfixed by the beauty of taillights. Red stop lights…green go lights, top lights, back lights, night lights. Had to remind myself that I was moving at 60 mph in a current of steel and aluminum and that it was occasionally important to slow down or even stop. Sometimes a car horn would alert me to the fact that I wasn’t really obeying the traffic laws to a T.

Miraculously enough, I made it to the theater, but when my co-workers caught a look at me, their jaws dropped. Was it my third eye? Had it appeared in the middle of my forehead? No, it wasn’t that. It was the fact that I looked completely off my head, dirty, sweaty, red-faced, generally insane. My boss shook his head and just muttered the word “Hannah…” Unfortunately I got aisle 3 that night, the biggest aisle, which meant I had to seat 150 people. They would approach me and hold out their tickets, small bits of cardboard, colored either rose or sea-foam green. These tickets had black numbers on them (which crawled like ants when you looked at them long enough) having some relation to what I was meant to do with them. I couldn’t always comprehend what, exactly. But then (mind over matter, positive thinking) I’d snap to, and say “Follow me, please” and lope (or maybe stumble) down the aisle to the correct row. I could hear the people behind me say: “What’s the matter with him?” “I don’t know, but it’s scary…he’s like a ghost.” I thought, “It’s only me, it’s only dumb ol’ Duncan.” This drug was almost impossible to “maintain” on. It had been nine hours already, and I was still peaking, I’d had enough.

The music was another surprise. I couldn’t handle the sound of an electric guitar. It sounded like the vicious whine of a table saw in shop class, slicing right through my poor overtaxed brain. After the show I went by myself up to a vacant lot in Kenwood, where I smoked joint after joint of cheap weed, hoping to change the nature of my high from chemical to organic. I didn’t get much sleep that night, and the next day in school I noticed the persistent feeling that someone was scratching the inside of my (hollow) eyeball with their fingernail. I could even hear a scritch scritch scritch. This unpleasant sensation lasted about six weeks. That was my last acid trip.

Five years ago “Satisfaction” was the number-one song on the AM dial, blaring from every transistor radio across the country. I remember hearing its sinister tones wafting over the Minnekahda Club pool. Today I’m going apeshit over Iggy and the Stooges’ new album, Fun House. “Down on the street…I’m lost in love….”

I can’t get into the teen spirit of the Hopkins High pep rally. Purple Power! Youth Fever! Sieg heil! School is intended to prepare us for a life of submission. Dead wasted energy in high school. Makes me sick.

I put out a comic book with some other freaks that is sold in the hallways for a dime. The Daily Planet. My mom gets a call from a concerned parent who’d said she’d already had enough trouble with her son without this pornography inciting him to take drugs. She said countless other parents were up in arms. They were going to see that it stopped. The lady asks my mom if she knew what I was putting out. “Yes, but my son is a very, very nice boy and has a great deal of artistic talent.” Lady on the phone said I had to be on drugs to do the awful things to her son that I did. (In a comic book!?!?) Mom’s scared and shaking. Poor dear. She weakens and tells me I’m missing out on the best years of my life.

But meanwhile, my art teacher, Vern, says I’ve got it, just do it harder, that I’m on the verge of greatness. So…I’ve been making a six-foot-tall papier-mâché sculpture of a sax player with a diving helmet on his head. Vern says I must devote myself to art, carry a sketchbook everywhere.

September 20. Jimi Hendrix od’d in a London hotel room two days ago. He is dead. I remember soaring through the stratosphere with him in the headphones one night in a friend’s basement on some pretty strong acid…realized the music was made for this. Space music. Whipping through the galaxies at warp speed. “You got me floatin’.” Saw him a couple times at the Auditorium, found him a bit clownish but he sure could play that guitar.

More Concerts

Savoy Brown

Poco

Johnny Winter And (with Rick Derringer)

Youngbloods

Grateful Dead

Elton John

Eddie Harris

Flying Burrito Brothers

Faces (with Rod Stewart)

John Sebastian

Leo Kottke

Neil Young

Al Kooper

Taj Mahal

Elvin Jones

I check in in homeroom each morning before walking across the golf course back home again. The joys of “modular scheduling,” which basically means I don’t have to spend much time in school. I usually have the house to myself as Dad is downtown being a corporate lawyer and Mom is off being an interior decorator. Anyhow, at nine a.m., I sit behind Laurie Gold, who is a heavy-lidded, slim Jewish girl with velvet pants and no bra. A spoiled and sultry rock chick whose dad owns a chain of food stores. She drives a Camaro and always has good hash. She’s continually looking down to see if her tits are arranged right, then moistening her lips. We have sex together once in a while, but I don’t see her as girlfriend material. She’s got a phony way about her. She’s a real snob and looks down on all these high-school jocks and squares. Except me. I’m the chosen one…She says she cares about me but I’m impossible to communicate with. She says I have highly developed intuitive skills, including ESP!

“Why don’t you come over and treat me like a whore,” she whispers over my desk, then giggles. “My parents are in Florida, and I’ve got some good weed.” She’s on the Pill. Wants to get some use out of it. It’s very tempting, but I have a hard time objectifying girls that I basically don’t like very much. And afterwards I’m stuck with her. I’m often telling her that she and I don’t mix, we’re too different. She doesn’t argue the fact, but never gives up. Says she is “a silly little girl.” So after spending a sleepless Friday night thinking about how there is a real, live, naked teenage girl not five minutes away, I succumb to my base desires, get up early, drive over there, and ring the doorbell. She answers in a white robe that’s open all the way down, heavy with sleep. Slutty and pleased that her honey trap has worked. We headed straight for the living room couch, where she straddled me. Mixed emotions.

Janis Joplin was found dead this morning. I got high with her and Big Brother when they played the Guthrie. Brought a couple buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken to their dressing room. They were so skanky. The boys said, “Look, Janis, your chicken is here!,” all laughing at the sweet young fellow in his blue blazer and gray flannel uniform. Janis’s eyes were dancing all over me, smackin’ her lips at the meal before her—me! She was playin’ the horny chicken hawk, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, making rude remarks. Nobody touched the chicken, but we stood in a circle in the cramped quarters and passed a joint around. I was trying to act cool, but the dope was so strong that I came out of some kind of time warp to see that they were all laughing at me as if I were a choirboy they had just corrupted. She came over and comforted me, smelling of patchouli oil, her feather boa tickling my nose. I blushed. I felt like a real hayseed.

Fifteen minutes later she was on stage, stamping her foot, sweating, screaming. I thought she was tragic even then. Saw her over a year later without Big Brother, liked her even less. Too much angst. Gone now.

Girls: Where is my loony rock ’n’ roll queen? I scour the yellow-tiled school hallways filled with zombie vibes looking for my soulmate. I need some more carnal knowledge. It’s November, time for indoor games. I saw Performance, so I want someone like Anita Pallenberg, or Genevieve Waite or Susannah York or Monica Vitti. There’s a girl in my theater class named Rachel who’s cool, but she’s got a boyfriend already. Although once she did pull me into the dark maroon velvet folds of the stage curtain and we made out for a minute or two. She’s got a dark mane of hair and interesting eyebrows, braless tight T-shirts and hip-huggers, high-heel leather boots. A vixen for sure. Haughty attitude. Our teacher is a wire-rimmed liberal who plays with his beard constantly. Always yakking about Ionesco and the experimental theater. Us kids write a nonsense play called Cincinnati World’s Fair 1936 that came out of improv. Totally stupid, but our teacher twiddles his beard and stares at us intently like it’s genius. He has a great investment in being “with it.” He’s a creep.

College entrance forms hanging over my head. Hampshire, Boston University, and Bard. I write an essay for the applications on the good and the bad in me. I write a book review of Slaughterhouse-Five.

I’m writing these journals to capture my youth. When I’m fifty in an easy chair in Scotland I can pull them out and relive my teendom. It’ll be in an archaic lingo.

Met a girl called Angie Miller who goes to Minnetonka. She’s little. Ninety-eight pounds. Flirty. Ran into her at some countercultural festival and she took my hand and said, “Where do we go now, Funny?” Cute. Still a virgin. Looks like Minnie Mouse. Clucks her tongue a lot. Eats “sammies.” We go to 2001. Even better, we go to Borsalino. Marseilles, 1930. Pin-striped gangsters. Belmondo and Delon. Great soundtrack.

The I-Ching says I will go through a lot of changes and will eventually be very successful, with riches both spiritual and otherwise. It warned me to not let that go to my head, to keep it simple. Says I always have a thing with identity.

Astrologically speaking, I’m on the cusp between Leo and Virgo, with Pisces rising. My numerology number is 7, and my color is green. I don’t know what any of that means.

Meanwhile, my new girlfriend’s passivity and virginity is wearing me down. We’re at a party at Archie Cosgrove’s parents’ mansion (his dad is governor or something, which is weird because Archie is like a werewolf, always so stoned and wanting nothing more than a bowl of Rice Krispies). Angie is there, in white majorette boots, a little girl’s blouse with tiny flowers all over it, a red Eisenhower jacket with a fur collar, and black corduroy pants. My imagination plays around in her pants. Angie leads me away to the bowels of the mansion, sits me down on a bay window seat, moonlight on her face. Pulls me to her, all swoony-like, eager for that thing I do with her musky black patch. It’s fun, but it’s a one-way street.

Another time, at Archie’s parents’ horse farm, we were drinking Bacardi rum in the fancy sunken living room, and someone had an archaic stag movie that he projected onto the wall. No women! Just nude men and their dicks, jouncing on bongo boards…all sorts of dicks, circumcised, uncircumcised, Negroid, Caucasian, skin-tight erections, culminating in a super close-up of a fly walking across the purple head of a penis (taking his time, too). A drop of semen appears. Totally gross and confusing to this group of entitled youth on the brink of manhood. We all spent the night, smoking and drinking and listening to Tim Buckley. In the morning we were still fucked up, so we talked to the horses.

Listening to the new Velvet Underground LP, Loaded. “Then one fine mornin’ she hears a New York station / She don’t believe what she heard at all…hey, not at all.” Also, the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle is fantastic. Such a rich wealth of music coming out. It’s where we get our messages, our subversive directions. It’s the soundtrack to our lives. The centerpiece to all this action. Ties us all together.

My parents left for eleven days. Steady stream of visitors: Angie; hilarious Steve Kramer, pianist, artist, and general absurdist with dangerous tendencies (mostly to himself, crazy feats of derring-do, like climbing up a wall and hanging from the rafters upside down); and Kurt Thometz, a shaggy beatnik informed by the Evergreen Review and Grove Press paperbacks. Miracles came to pass, staying up for days with ganja weed, opium, champagne, angel dust, and super-hash. A big New Year’s Eve bash at my parents’ shingled Cape Cod–style house attracts loads of freaks who needed a place to go and derange their senses. Ice-cream orgy in the kitchen somehow leaves the Formica countertop burnt. Green cake frosting on ceiling. Some group dancing makes it look like the floor just might cave in. I was in the basement as it started to rain sawdust. Uh-oh. Angie and I go outside in the freezing moonlight to see if the earth is tremoring. I had to talk some guy down from a bad LSD trip with my cosmic homilies. Kids were storing their cheap hippie wine in the snowbanks outside to chill for later consumption. “Can this happen, is it all right?” my cousin Swanny asks me. “This is us!” yells Kramer, having some kind of revelation. “Let the giant out!” he bellows. Someone gives me a gas mask and a white lace hat. Gershwin’s “Funny Face” is booming from the big KLH speakers. At midnight everyone congregates in the living room to see what’s next, they nosedive into a hog pile of writhing flesh screaming “I LOVE YOU!” A mangy collection of electrified, reeling, bug-eyed loons filled with holy smoke. The house has blasted off! Steve Brooks looking like Martha Washington in a surgeon’s drawstring pants with one rain boot and one after-ski boot, in love with cute Mary Kennedy. Jimmy Clifford has got his hand down Monica Muller’s pants. There’s a guy unconscious on the pool table. At five in the morning we dress up like old ladies and go to Perkins Pancake House for breakfast, hollow-eyed and covered in kisses.

January 1971. I heard the voice of Mrs. Lovingfoss over my homeroom intercom say that I have been nominated to be a Sno-Daze candidate. What a hoot!

Oh no, now it’s really happened…I have been elected Sno-Daze king! My moptop got crowned onstage in the gym. Huge roar of laughter, disbelief, and applause from the student body. Flashbulbs go off—flash, flash, flash! Much cheering from the “heads,” who have one of their own elected as the wintertime equivalent of homecoming king, traditionally given to the captain of the wrestling team. A purple-velvet and faux-ermine cape is put over my tattered Salvation Army shoulders. The queen (a very pretty straight girl I have never noticed before) and I march through the noisy throng, she holding a large bouquet of roses. It was fun, actually, but weird. My parents flipped out, having assumed I was an outcast from society. My cousin Cynthia said, “No, everyone loves Duncan.” There was a photo of me in the school paper looking appropriately wasted in art class, next to the two runners-up, a couple of burly jocks who looked like they could eat me for breakfast…and still be hungry. Headlines said, “Congratulations to Our 1971 Sno-Daze King, Duncan Hannah.” What a goof! The times, they are a changin’.

Things are heating up with Rachel, the raven-haired temptress from theater class. I sneak cigs with her under the stage. She tells me about an erotic dream she had with me. “When either of us get blue we should comfort each other, don’t you think?” she said in the foyer one day, looking very alive with lust. We made out at the cast party for Cincinnati World’s Fair and she wanted to find an empty bedroom then and there, but like a fool I told her to wait until the others went home and the next thing I knew she was gone. Seize the moment! She’s got pale gray eyes like a Siamese cat and hard, wide breasts with permanently erect nipples. She came over after school one day and we had Scotch-and-sodas and grass, listening to a stack of rock records, then made out on my single bed, dry-humping like crazy, but she wouldn’t go all the way out of deference to her boyfriend. Our time will come; we’re like magnets drawn together.

March 3, 1971. I’m stayin’ at Kurt’s this week. My parents are in Austria, and I’m not allowed to stay alone anymore after the New Year’s Eve party debacle. Use chopsticks for Kurt’s brown rice, onions, carrot, and mushroom diet. He wakes me up to give me a mug of honey and cinnamon in warm milk. He says, “Here, this will help you sleep.” Quit smokin’ butts. Don’t brush my teeth, read, draw, write, cut and paste, drive. Listening to Nico a lot. Meet Rachel for secret sexy rendezvous. I smell my fingers. She says, “You sure have a lot of energy, you’re always right there.”

More Concerts

Captain Beefheart

Ry Cooder

The Grease Band

Savoy Brown

The Faces

Ian and Sylvia

Miles Davis

Allen Ginsberg

Laura Nyro

The Allman Brothers

The Stooges

Mott the Hoople

Emerson, Lake and Palmer

J. Geils Band

Johnny Winter And

John Mayall

Magazines say the seventies are gonna be about nostalgia. There’s still a war we’re waging in Vietnam. I’m not proud to be an American.

I’ve been accepted to Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, so it’s the East Coast for me next fall. I’ll put myself in odd situations. I won’t avoid challenges, I will uncover my true grit. I’ll exhaust my resources and keep pushing through. I will embrace imperfection (something I find myself thinking about a lot). Fantasies about who I am and what I want may not be true. What is innately “me” will come naturally.

I’ve been reading D. H. Lawrence lately. Saw Women in Love for the second time. I like the end where Alan Bates is living in a small stone cottage by a river with his blond lover, catching fish for their supper. Aspirational.

Driving down Highway 12 on my way to the Guthrie Theater I have a premonition that something big is going to happen tonight. Allen Ginsberg himself! Kerouac’s best friend and international ambassador for the Beat Generation (which is currently meaning more to me than this bogus Aquarian Age I find myself in). There he is, doing a sound check, dressed in faded blue slip-on boat shoes, new baggy Levi’s, a blue work shirt, a cheap early flower-power wide pink-and-marigold tie, and a red lumberjack jacket. A beatnik!

I’m working the show, so I seat the people, the beret crowd, college kids, plus a lot of English teachers and poet types. I crouch near the foot of the stage, below his podium. Ginsberg’s playing his harmonium, it’s wheezing away. He uses a different voice for each poem. Pushes his black-framed glasses up his nose. Shakes his big yoga belly. Swings his curly black ringlets to the ceiling. His Blakean songs, his CIA conspiracies, his ganja-weed references. Then he recites the Whitmanesque “Please Master,” his childlike ode to homosexual love. He looks down at me and chants it into my wide eyes, like a hypnotist. It’s all about teenage bellies and innocent man-boy love, softly spoken in his faint New Jersey accent. “Please master, make me say Please master fuck me now…” And then it’s over and he’s beaming at me, and I was quite turned on by his sweet brazenness. There is a silence, a tittering of applause, then resounding applause.

Part two: More William Blake songs. Ginsberg is fantastic, mesmerizing. Then the show is over. I climb up on the octagonal stage where the Great Man is talking with radicals and poets and people who are going to modern schools in Switzerland. He looks up at me and puts his arm around my waist and says, “Hello, what’s your name?”

“I saw you in the shadows and thought you were too good to be true.” He is hustled away by some serious people, leaving me grinning at the fairy-tale aspect of the magical night. Kurt (my closest beatnik buddy) and I go backstage and I tell him about Allen’s attentions. Kurt says, “He’s trying to pick you up!” Then we run into Allen, who’s trying to escape his fans. He asks us how to get to the greenroom.

“C’mon, we’’ll show ya,” and he follows us up a gray stairwell, carrying a worn leather attaché case full of poems. He says, “What are you two guys up to, anyhow?”

He’s staring at me in an intense way and says, “You’re too beautiful, you know that? I suppose everyone tells you that.”

In the greenroom he asks if I want to go to a party. “I don’t think I can,” I said, it being a school night and all.

“Well, come if you can,” he says, sitting down into a full lotus position, about to give a press conference.

Kurt and I adjourn into a corner by the vending machines. “Kurt, what do I do now?!?” I’m in his love spell. He is the king of the beats and I am his designated crush. I watch his press conference in rapture. I was meant to give a bunch of guys rides home, but I couldn’t tear myself away from those beautiful vibes. He’s telling a story about Bill Burroughs, now in England, who is making funny anti-marijuana advertisements. A mad scientist with a huge hypo injects pure cannabis into a buckled-down pregnant rat. The needle is so big that it pops the rat’s stomach, blood everywhere. “See, that’s what happens,” Burroughs says in his expressionless voice.

Allen is trying to drag himself away from the questioning people. He’s still talking to someone as he pauses at a table and writes something on an eight-by-five index card. When he finally extricates himself, he comes over and puts his arm around me, gives me the card, says, “Here’s where I’ll be, then afterwards at the Gay Liberation Front…if you can make it.”

That was it. I didn’t go. Even though I wanted to. I wanted more Allen, but not the kind that I was sure would be on offer. I could’ve told him about the animated short I was drawing based on “Howl.” I could have given him a copy of my newest comic, Lip Balm Comix. I could have asked him questions about Desolation Angels. But that’s not what he would have been interested in. I recognized in his gaze the same look of infatuation that I too get, when faced with someone whose beauty speaks to me in a personal way…as if you’re witnessing some kind of miracle. Even tonight, in the audience, I saw Lisa Friedman, who I’ve met once, and fell instantly head over heels for. Too tongue-tied to even talk to her, dazzled by her looks. So I knew what Allen was feeling, although he was much more forward than me. I bet his seduction success rate is pretty high. I’m sure our paths will cross again.

She’s pushing her body against me in a dark bathroom at a friend’s house. We move to a bedroom, also dark. “Let’s get naked,” I whisper, unbuttoning her blouse.

“Well…what if someone comes in and finds us flopping around like a couple of fishes?” “Then it will be funny,” I reply. “Besides, we should be able to do anything together, and this stands between us. We could have done it all winter. If we do it, you won’t feel so nervous about it anymore. And it’ll be so much fun! We’ll be like Indians!”

“Well, you’d have to stay with me…all night. I couldn’t go home alone. You’d have to be there.”

Her back is arched over my lap, pulling me so hard against her mouth that it clicks. She shudders as I stroke my fingers over her dark triangle. No deflowering tonight.

Back at the Guthrie for a Sunday-night concert, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Getting there early, I can hear them doing their sound check. Running down the back stairway listening to the fantastic, majestic Emersonian organ. There he is in black, with his Prince Valiant haircut, with a colossal array of keyboards, piano, two organs, an electric harpsichord, a Moog, a theremin. They’re laughing, jamming. To an audience of one…me. It’s like being in a baroque rock cathedral. What a rush. At the show Keith plays pirate, sticks daggers in his organ. He’s like a sexy Phantom of the Opera. When it was all over, I was leaving, passed by the stage. Keith Emerson was alone, playing the piano. I said, “Good night.” He looked up and said, “Yeah, man,” and grinned.

My dad says, generously, “Holly did everything by the book—good grades, married a Harvard man, and all the rest—and you know, it’s kind of boring. You, on the other hand, give me some vicarious excitement. I wanted you to be Ivy League and go to law school and become president of United Airlines. But you had these special talents that I don’t understand. You shouldn’t waste them. Either you’re going to be a great success or a miserable failure.”

I read “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, inspiring nonsense prose. I was writing tons of stream of consciousness in the winter, squeezing my brain out like a sponge. Now I have Breathless to show for it, my self-published comic book. Conceived with hashish, scrambled memories, and a Rapidograph pen.

I remember my adolescent boys’ school friend Henry See. His parents were rich (advertising). His glamorous mom had been on the cover of Life. Henry had braces. We were boxing partners (compulsory). He lived in a big house on Lake Minnetonka, and we used to swim there with his two younger sisters. We learned all the capitals of South America at the lunch table (cherry tomatoes). They were all Catholics. I often slept over on Saturday nights, huddled in sleeping bags in the basement telling ghost stories. They’d leave me alone on Sunday morning when they went to Mass. I’d go through the junk drawers, watch their color TV (the first I’d seen, distorted Day-Glo), play Henry’s records (the Animals, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Herman’s Hermits, Beatles, Stones, Dylan). We played spy, Henry was 008 and I was 006. Henry had watched his cousin make out on the couch and had checked for pubic hairs the following morning. Henry was brilliant, but a crybaby. He had freckles like Alfalfa and a pudding-bowl haircut. Wore glasses. Was much smarter than me. I just got a letter from him from Montreal (where he now lives). He says people are androids and he doesn’t associate with androids.

Henry and I had gone to Miss Mayhew’s dancing school together. I wore Royal Lyme cologne. Danced a slow dance with prematurely busty Alice Kaplan to the Box Tops’ “Neon Rainbow” and got a boner that I tried to hide from her. She was well aware of my condition and seemed to nestle right into it. Erotic bliss!

There’s a fancy party at the new Walker Art Center which I’ve been hired to work at. Leo Kottke is the entertainment. After some gorgeous acoustic guitar instrumentals, he is blabbing to the guests about a diagram of a sperm cell he studied. Then says, “Excuse me, but I’m gonna take a break for about half an hour to get something to eat, cuz if I don’t, I’m gonna be drunk for the rest of my life.”

The Minnetonka Prom. All our girlfriends are graduating. Pre-prom party at my house. Cold Duck, grass, wine, Scotch, and Colt 45 malt liquor. We’re listening to Ruben and the Jets to get in the mood. As for corsages, Tommy’s got a lilac branch for Mary. I’ve got some wildflowers in a rubber band for Angie. Kramer’s got a log for Lainie. We set off in my mom’s station wagon. Lainie’s already ripped her dress, Kramer’s already stained his white tuxedo. He’s puking out the back window as we’re speeding down Highway 7 on our way to the country club. Then he’s gone. Where’d he go? He’s on the roof of the car! Tommy climbs out to get him down. Lainie is crying because her boyfriend is crazy. So is she. Then she goes out the window to get him. All this at 50 mph. They get him back in but he’s out again, this time dragging behind, ripping his knees out. I stop. We piss. Kramer casually says he’s got suicidal thoughts. Finally we get to the Lafayette Club and park. Kramer immediately disappears.

Angie and I go into the lobby, trying to walk in a straight line. An official stops me. “Okay, let’s see your breath,” he says.

The high-school principal, Mr. Brominschinkel, says, “What have we got here?”

Looking him in the eye I say, “I had a beer about two hours ago. I feel fine.”

“Well, the rules are blah blah blah,” says the principal. The police are called in, they call my father to pick me up. When he arrives, he greets me by saying, “Hello, criminal.” A very solemn ride home. We have to return the next day to pick up the car. All for a stupid prom that was supposed to be a goof in the first place. Brother!

Back at school after another wild weekend. Keg party with a hundred crazies. Busted by a helicopter. Pushin’ too hard. Feeling schizo. Snort some speed. Burn out my nose. My cock shrinks to the size of a peanut. Talk to my new pal Crosby about everything under the sun, about sex drives and nudism and Terence Stamp and gold-slipper suburbia and Black Jack chewing gum and psychotic theater and Fleetwood Mac. My fantasies sometimes don’t click with my true self, which causes opposition. But I’m about to leave to spend the summer with my sister in Naples. Her husband is in the Navy, stationed on the USS Cascade. Should be an eye opener.