ONE OF MY BEST friends is about six years older than me and a veteran of the Vietnam War. How I met Kim Lemser is over our mutual love for electric blues. The Parkway Village neighborhood I lived in at the time, when I was nearing my junior year in high school, was unusually tight and friendly. Everyone knew everyone and we all socialized. On pleasant evenings people sat in lawn chairs in their driveways and visited. My dad worked for the telephone company and got a discarded telephone pole that he erected off the concrete patio in our backyard, turning it into a makeshift basketball court. It was small, but was big enough for us to have rowdy games virtually the whole year long. Most couples in our neighborhood were much younger than my parents. These young fathers, in their twenties and early thirties, loved to come over to our house to shoot basketball with us. In fact, they taught me how to play the game and taught me well.
Another older couple lived down the street, Dick and Juanita, who were roughly the same age as my parents, and we all heard about their son, Kim, who was in Vietnam. Another friendly neighbor was the first person I knew who had a genuine real stereo hi-fi. For you gearheads he had a Dynaco tube amplifier, a Bang and Olufsen turntable, and Fisher speakers. I spent virtually every penny I made on record albums. Sometimes before I would even open the album cover, I would take it to this neighbor’s house and ask if I could play it on his hi-fi. This is how I first heard the Sgt. Pepper album by the Beatles. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever had a more powerful listening experience.
This neighbor bought one of the first cassette decks ever marketed. I knew about reel-to-reel tape recorders, but as fine as the sound was, they were impractical in everyday use. Cassettes were the new thing and catching on big. Vinyl records were not popular in the hot and humid climate of Vietnam, where they could easily warp in the heat and the heavy dust ruined both records and the gear. American soldiers quickly adapted to cassettes.
Everyone on Navaho, my street, knew I was fanatical about rock music and had a lot of albums. They thought perhaps my tastes would coincide with Kim Lemser’s over in Vietnam. Kim had even asked his parents specifically to get him Mountain’s Climbing album on cassette. Well, I had that record in my collection and my neighbor with the hi-fi could record it to cassette tape. They asked me if I might recommend some similar albums, and I did. They recorded those too and sent them off to Kim Lemser, A.P.O., Vietnam.
I thought nothing more about it until I heard Kim, whom I had never met, would be coming home on leave. A few days later there was a knock at our back door, and a slender, nice-looking older guy was standing there who I couldn’t place. He introduced himself as Kim Lemser, the guy in the Army, and he asked if he might go through my record collection and pick a few other albums to record to cassette that he could take back with him to ’Nam. It seems that my other choices that were sent to him hit on all cylinders. When I showed him the electric guitar, my first, I had just gotten, a 1959 Gibson Melody Maker, he was even more interested. He had been in a garage band himself and loved electric guitars, biding his time to get another one until he was out of the service. We talked a long time about a lot of things.
I, in turn, paid Kim visits at his parents’ house down the street. He invited me to go riding around with him as he re-immersed himself in Memphis while on leave, going back to his old haunts in his Berclair neighborhood and slowly reconnecting with old friends. Kim was not in combat in Vietnam; he was a radio operator who was almost always on the periphery of the action but not actually in it. That didn’t stop the occasional incoming fire, and he told me about explosions outside his radio truck that had him diving for cover. He also told me about the fear of driving down jungle roads that might be booby-trapped or receive sniper fire. This was heady stuff to a 15-year-old.
There were other things he taught me. About the party girls in Vietnam who would pleasure the G.I.s. Although I was loathe to admit it to most of the guys I palled around with, like them, I was a virgin. All we talked about was girls and sex. It was tattooed in our heads. But talk—big talk at that—is all it was. Bullshit was the order of the day. To have a friend who had not only done it, but done it many times, many ways, with all different kinds of girls, was like getting a master class in sex. I asked a million questions. I wanted to know everything.
And I wanted to know about drugs. Strike that. I was only really interested in trying marijuana. By this time I was a subscriber to Rolling Stone magazine. Pot smoke practically wafted off the pages when you opened that month’s edition. With the stark exception of Frank Zappa who pointedly did not use drugs, everyone else was doping like madmen. By this time Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and others had met their ends from drug use. Drugs were everywhere. Except in Sheffield school. Drugs hadn’t made a significant appearance there just yet.
I was scared of heavy drugs, particularly hallucinogenic drugs like LSD. But I was pretty sure marijuana was relatively harmless and that I wouldn’t die from smoking a few joints. Vietnam, of course, was a pharmacopeia of recreational drugs for G.I.s. My new friend was well-acquainted with just about all of them and was able to tell me in great detail exactly what they were all about. We scored some hashish—which I naively thought was the same thing as regular pot—on the Highland Strip, the hippie Mecca of the day in Memphis. I knew a guy there and he helped us score. I had never had more than a taste of liquor in my life. I had never experienced a high of any kind. I expected the high from this marijuana thing to be nothing more than a mild euphoria.
As anyone with experience can tell you, hashish is potent, powerful stuff. It hit me like The Cannonball Express. Everything felt … different. Everything looked … different. We bought orange sodas and when the first sip hit the back of my throat it was as if I had developed some supersense of taste. Nothing before or since has ever tasted so orange. When I got home I immediately went to bed, but not without an inquisition from my Mom about where I had been. I could barely get the words out. The next morning I still felt slightly high and was worried I’d never feel normal again. I prayed to God to spare me from this awful thing. The day after that I felt fine, normal. And I was ready to try pot again.
That was my drug year. Drugs invaded my school to the point they were practically falling out of the lockers. There were the jocks, the freaks, and the nerds. I was considered a freak, but I never grew my hair very long, and never got that far out with my clothes. I didn’t try any other drugs, even though they were offered to me almost on a daily basis. I smoked a good bit of marijuana that year, got to know it pretty well. One thing that no one had told me about is these awful thoughts that would run through my head while under the influence. I would become terrified that the police would find a grain or two of marijuana and hustle me off to a dungeon where I would spend the rest of my life beating rats off my decomposing body. Death would permeate my thoughts. Paranoia they would call it, and the more I smoked the more unpleasant it got.
I was rousted from a school assembly that year along with a couple of other freaks because I was suspected of harboring drugs. I had none, so they didn’t find anything. But with the entire school body witnessing me being hustled out of the auditorium, you can imagine the rumors that flew. I didn’t like it one bit that I was labeled a doper. I’ve explained that my parents were devout Southern Baptists who never missed a Sunday morning or Sunday night. My brother and I were required to go. I remember the Sunday School superintendent telling me that her children—who were in grade school at an entirely different school—had told her that they had heard that I was busted for selling LSD. This was a miserable time for me. By senior year I had completely given up smoking pot and never really fooled with any other drugs later except a sniff or two, a puff or two, for social purposes, later. And that was mostly to appease girls I was with so as not to appear to be a stick in the mud. But I didn’t like it.
Fast forward a couple of years. I had turned 18 which meant I could get a real job other than throwing newspapers. I was preparing for fall admission to Memphis State University and did not yet know what my course of study would be. My friend Kim Lemser had finished his tour of duty in ’Nam and was back home in Memphis. His father was in the auto parts business and had gotten him a job at Parts Distributors Warehouse or PDW for short. Kim got one of the better warehouse jobs at PDW, working the will call desk, filling orders for people who came in off the street for auto parts. Kim’s dad also got me a job at PDW, loading trucks. It was a hard, dirty, labor-intensive job that paid minimum wage. But it put gas in my 1965 Mustang, which my Dad had bought me upon graduation from high school. Finally I could take girls out in my own car.
A lot of very tough black guys, many of them my age, worked at PDW. I got along well with most of them and those I didn’t get along with were too scared to mess with me because I was under the protection of a sweetheart of a black guy I will call Andrew. Andrew took an instant liking to me; he had a literary bent and would write verse on cardboard that he would hang up around his work station. He boxed up parts and sometimes I helped him. He had been a ranked football player in high school and was built like a Caterpillar tractor. He had huge biceps, a neck like a Spanish bull, and could flip a switch that made him look like the most ferocious badass in town. He struck fear in the hearts of the homeboys who liked to stir up shit. But to me he was Gentle Ben.
There was a little office off the main warehouse where a small group of graphic artists worked on catalogs for the company. Occasionally the artists would need to walk through the warehouse to go to the catalog room, where clerks took phone orders. No one paid them any attention unless she walked through the warehouse. She was a petite, gorgeous little black girl, in her early twenties, who was always made up, always superbly-dressed, and in her tight mini-skirts would bring all activity in the warehouse to a dead halt when she walked through. I’m not joking when I say everything would stop—it was like something out of a Marx Brothers movie.
I remember a black guy turning to me as she walked by one day and saying, “Man, I’d turn her upside down and lick her like a lollipop.”
At this time Kim and I had gone our separate paths and although we were still on speaking terms, rarely did. Once he had gotten settled back in Memphis he, quite naturally, sought out friends his own age and left the kid, me, to his own devices. We both still loved electric guitars and when we did spare a minute to chat it was generally guitar talk.
I worked at PDW for a year, hating it, and then got what to a student was a dream job, working as a clerk for what was then called First National Bank of Memphis. It was still a minimum wage job but I was working with a much better class of riff-raff.
Sometime around my sophomore year of college I heard that my old acquaintance Kim Lemser was involved in an accident. Everyone in the neighborhood was talking about it. He had taken a girl—a black girl—to a movie drive-in. When his car wouldn’t start he poured some gasoline in the carburetor to see if that might spark it and get it to turn over. He told the girl to wait for his signal before she turned on the ignition. She misunderstood and turned on the ignition switch as he was pouring the gas, which caused it to explode in Kim’s face. He had to be rushed to the hospital with severe facial burns. But what everyone was talking about was Kim taking a black girl—!!—to the drive-in, obviously for immoral purposes.
Kim was an only child and his parents doted on him. When they came to see him in the hospital he wasn’t keen on them being there. He didn’t want to discuss it. When it was determined that no major damage had been done and that in time he would fully recover, they wanted to inquire about this black woman he was with. One effect Vietnam had on a lot of veterans was a complete disregard for being preached to or told what to do. Kim wasn’t having any of it.
About a decade after this accident, Kim and I caught back up with one another and have been close friends ever since. We touch base just about every day. We joke about it saying we stay in touch just to make sure we’re both still alive. A few years back he was in a mood to talk about his accident at the drive-in.
He said, “You knew who I was with that night didn’t you?”
I replied that I didn’t. I had just assumed it was some pick-up girl he had met at a club or bar somewhere in town and had taken to the drive-in for some backseat thrills.
“That was Dell I was with,” he said.
I didn’t know who he was talking about.
“Do you remember that cute black girl who worked at PDW in the Advertising Department who’d walk through the warehouse…”
“Oh God, THAT WAS YOUR GIRLFRIEND???!!!”
And so it was. Some guys have all the luck. When I started having some of my own black girlfriends Kim said, “Man, you got that from me.”