Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: Mystic Eyes
Winter of 1970
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?!?”
I pause. “You’re right.”
Silence. Then he says, “Go ahead, it will be.”
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.
May 26, 1970
Saw Roland Kirk at the Extr"rdinaire 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
Summer Vacation
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.
New York City Trip
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.
