In my own family, my mom was the dominant force. My dad seemed, and had pretty much always seemed, to be gladly taking a backseat in family affairs. He seemed to want to escape from any inter- or intra-family social obligations, and he largely succeeded. I think my older brother and sister grew up in a different dynamic, although I wasn't there, of course, coming along nine years after my sister. At age six, my dad taught me how to ride a bike. We were riding down the street and I was talking to him when I realized that he wasn't listening. And the thought popped into my head -- and has not left -- that something is wrong with my dad. Well, turns out he grew up in a dysfunctional environment, judging from the few stories I coaxed out of him later. Plus, he spent nine months or so being shelled by the Nazis as a Warrant Officer in the Quartermaster Corps attached to Patton's Third Army in World War II. This is generally described now as "untreated post-traumatic stress syndrome." The symptoms are classic -- workaholism, alcoholism, agoraphobia. He didn't know what the hell to make of me, but I think he got around to caring at some point. We had something of a relationship near the end of his life. I think my mom talked him into me more or less against his true wishes. The whole operation was poisoned by Ayn Rand's snake oil, for which "John Galt" stands as a metaphor. My mom embraced this pseudo-philosophy, and when I was lying in a hospital bed in February 1975, nearly dead from hepatitis (too many drugs, not enough food, bad company), she dumped a pile of Ayn Rand books on me, which I read. Since I didn't want to die, I got off drugs, off the street, and into the "workforce." by February of 1976, I was well on my way to becoming a "concrete man" in the construction business. This was after a stint in the carnival and a very positive and life-changing experience at a commune outside of Ithaca, NY. Now, at age 63, I can see that this "Summer of '75," and my experiences in the carnival and the commune were life-saving events, not the Ayn Rand books. Those merely raised many questions that, in Rand's own work, remained unanswered. (Example? What about the fucking environment -- the other-than-human world that we cannot live without, the most important question of our time? Rand's answer: Crickets.)
I was a precocious kid who grew up to be a construction worker who was also an alchoholic (I ultimately switched addictions from hard drugs to alcohol in the interest of staying out of jail and staying alive), that "died" at age 30 and was reborn courtesy of Alcoholics Anonymous and a few benevolent strangers who took me under their wing. I'll name the most influential of them: Bob C., Mac, Barbara, and Greg, in reverse order of their influence probably. My wife is in a category of her own over and above these, and she came along later, after I had been clean and sober for ten years or so.
I met Greg in Harrison, Arkansas in 1979. We both had caught the back-to-the-land fever popularized by the counterculture and by publications like "The Mother Earth News," to which I remain a subscriber to this day. I caught it at the commune in upstate New York. Greg possessed a unique and rather extreme genius and had dropped out of society, for the most part. During a short career as a chemist, which followed his stints at Tulane and MIT, he invented the material that filters blood in kidney dialysis machines (Dow got the credit, the patent and the money). After a still shorter career as a truckdriver in Houston, Texas, he fled to Harrison and rented a room, at $2 a night, at the Rush Hotel, owned by the Kirby family. He, like me, had moved to Harrison to buy some land, which he did -- sixty-five acres in Carroll County near Osage -- in the middle of fucking nowhere. It was/is beautiful, although Greg died of leukemia in April of 2012 and I haven't seen it since probably 2006 or thereabouts. His brother Tom, a New Orleans attorney and landlord, owns it last I heard. Greg and I became fast friends and worked together off and on for years. Many Scrabble games were played, much beer was drunk, and we often worked on our respective places in the woods together. We once bought a case of dynamite (all you needed was an Arkansas driver's license) and blew up the road at my place near the Buffalo River to lay a water line from the spring. It was awesome. There are pictures.
Barbara was my AA buddy in the Branson, Missouri area, where I lived when I died and was reborn. We were two weeks apart in age and wisely maintained a platonic relationship for some years until she got married to some guy from New York and I moved to Newfoundland. We were pretty much joined at the hip for a couple of years, going to AA meetings and hanging out, drinking lots of coffee and helping other AAs. She was an ornery one with a great sense of humor and a subtle intelligence. She would fit the category of "hillbilly" for some. She grew up in a small town in the Arkansas Ozarks called Marshall. She had some African American blood in her, I think, and she took crap for it as a girl in Marshall and became something of a bully to survive. She had been a Air Force lifer brat up to that point, living in many places -- but she was very much a product of the Ozarks in her personality. She was in a failed marriage with three kids and was one of those "drunks" whose family was something she did when she was drinking. It's common in AA -- seeing people realize that their family was a product of their drinking and now that they're sober they question the whole arrangement. But she became reconciled to it and loved her grandchildren. She died in May of 2017, which I did not know until a year or so after the fact.
Mac remains my closest friend outside of my wife, and still lives in the Ozarks. He built a log cabin in Newton County, Arkansas in the 1980s-'90s. I helped with some of it. It is an amazing work of art at Pinhook Hollow, and I think will be long remembered and, I hope, treasured. Mac sold his place and moved to Holiday Island outside of Eureka Springs in the fall of 2019. He is writing a memoir and has shared it with me as he works through the draft stage. It's been a pleasure to get to know him better as a result. I met Mac in Greg's room at the Rush Hotel (#42) in Harrison in 1987 near the end of my drinking days. I knew right away that this was someone who had something to teach me. Mac had joined the Army in 1956 and was parachuted into Vietnam as an "advisor." He was wounded and came home and was honorably discharged. This gave him access to the GI Bill, and he studied philosophy at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale and got a degree in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis. He spent the rest of his working career as a counselor, mainly working with Vietnam veterans. Mac was never paid to be my counselor, but he was and is an informal counselor as well as a friend to me. We visit him every few months but, at age 85, I doubt he'll be driving up here anymore -- he has visited us a few times. I think it's accurate to say that Mac has been a surrogate father to me, hence his inclusion in the list of those who were instrumental in pulling my chestnuts out of the fire.
Bob C. (as he is known amongst his recovery friends), and I hit it off at first encounter at an AA banquet in Branson, Missouri. We bonded over the fact that we had both spent many happy hours "knockin' 'em down" at the Bucksnort Saloon in Conifer, Colorado. Bob was also a social worker, but had retired from that work and owned a resort on Lake Taneycomo in Branson. Like Barbara, Bob C. and I became fast friends over recovery. Unlike Barbara, Bob was into Joseph Campbell, as was I. Bob had actually met Campbell at some event, probably in Denver, and had asked him a question at the end of his talk. Bob, being wealthy, helped me out on a number of occasions -- he loaned me his van to commute to Springfield to college for a semester. He once bought my used astronomy book from me for $200. We passed many hours talking about spiritual matters and especially recovery. He was what we call in AA my Sponsor, although it was pretty informal. When I woke up in Intensive Care in Springfield during my meltdown (described below), he was there, as was Barbara. He now lives in Inglewood, Florida now and I see occasional comments from him on Facebook.
So, just for fun, I adopted the "hippie name" of Figment Zenguitar sometime around the millenial turn. I had read a book that had to do with Zen practice and guitar practice. And, I think the "Figment" handle came from the experience I had in a drug and alcohol addiction treatment center in Springfield, Missouri in 1989. I have described this elsewhere, and may describe it here at some point, but it's the story of a complete personality breakdown that the term "psychic emergency" or "second birth" aptly describes. While I was in the treatment center, called "Sigma House," I began writing out my life story as per the counselors' recommendation. During this process, the false selves created by my survival adaptations began to unpeel themselves. I would look in the mirror in my room and see someone different every few hours. It came to be expected that whoever I was looking at in the mirror was a mere "figment," and would soon change into someone else. It was like an intense LSD experience without the LSD and it was terrifying. When one passes from the Negative to the Positive, one must pass through Zero. At one point, I decided it would be good to run and to keep running until I passed out of Hell. This was in response to a dream I had had. That's when I ended up in Intensive Care with Rhabdomyosis. They found me unconscious on a baseball diamond, overheated with a body temperature of 107. Long story short, that's when it became apparent to me (with no assistance from psychotropic drugs) that we're all mere "figments" briefly manifested as whatever form we're in, be it an ant, an aardvark, a tree, or a human. We are all One Thing: The Universe, whatever that might mean. One thing I'm certain of: the human brain cannot grasp it, but the psyche as a whole can experience it, both negatively and positively. Once at an AA meeting in Branson, a newcomer who was clearly psychically distressed, once asked me, "How can you tell the difference between God and the Devil." Wow, did I understand that dilemma! I simply said, "It's all the same thing," meaning two sides of the same coin, so to speak. She left and I never saw her again. Given that we were in the buckle of the Bible Belt, I'm guessing she went to church. Hopefully, she didn't start drinking again.
My own meltdown in Springfield was followed by a slow-burn kind of meltdown that lasted all summer until, as my birthday of September 19 approached, it began to reach a critical stage and a sort of denouement. I had read enough of Campbell and eastern religions to understand that the answer to this problem might well lay in entering into my own Hell to face whatever demons remained, or at least the next layer of them. So I consciously said to myself, in my little cabin in the woods that had once been a post office and a gas station at Ridgedale, Missouri near the Arkansas line, that I must consciously and willingly walk into Hell. There are many micro-tangents to this story, like the "vision" (one of many) I had of the well-known drawing of Jesus knocking on the door and there's no outside doorknob -- the message being YOU have to open it from inside. Remember, I was in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Well, Jesus, as a metaphor for the true self that is a creation of the Universe and not a collection of defense mechanisms created by the mind and by Fear, in my case, kicked the fucking door down, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, and said, "Enough of this bullshit, son. It's time for you to wake the fuck up and love yourself and honor who you truly are." Yessir. That's pretty much what happened. It happened on my 32nd birthday, September 19, 1989, and on my one-year sober birthday. Friend Barbara was sitting at the kitchen table in my cabin bearing witness to most of it and providing a benevolent presence. In the midst of all this, I went to my work hanging house siding and fell out of the scaffold and broke my foot, etc., landing on a '56 Plymouth exactly like the one Uncle George (my dad's brother) had when I was a little kid. The car, parked in the Mockingbird neighborhood of Harrison, Arkansas off of Hester Drive, even had Sedgwick County, Kansas plates, where my Uncle had lived. If I hadn't landed on it, I would have landed on concrete and may well have broken my neck. Again, the full story of this is full of weird little details like Uncle George's Plymouth. Like, when I was at Sigma House three months earlier, my transformation began when I was sitting in the cafeteria, on a Saturday, on visitation day. A lot of Branson AA and Alanons were up to visit those of us in treatment, and as I sat there, a thunderstorm blew in -- it was June, just after the Tianenman Square incident, which we had watched on TV -- and suddenly I watched speechless as everyone's face began melting, just like in Raider's of the Lost Ark, when they open the Holy Grail. Now that I think about it, it was on my dad's birthday, June 13. There was a loud crack in the Universe, beyond the realm of conscious perception, and the world I had known slipped away, and I entered Hell, thus beginning the slow burn of what I believe is often referred to in Christian mythology as Purgatory. The last bit of work I had done before I checked into treatment with nine months of sobriety was putting siding on a cabin out in the woods in the Buffalo National River reserve in Arkansas. It was a National Park-owned cabin, and the Ranger was a Native American named Milt Sittingdown. Seriously. But I wasn't going to tell all of that here. Too late.
So this process really began . . . I remember being fourteen years old, when I was put off by the social pecking order that accompanied school sports, and I started hanging out with the "hippies," who accepted me, at least more than the "rich kids" whose parents were doctors or stock-brokers or whatever. I discovered drugs and alcohol, which made me feel much better or, as I was to learn some sixteen years later, much less. I found school both uncomfortable and boring, so at the age of fifteen, I pretty much quit going. I got a girlfriend. After two or three months of dating, she got pregnant. The pregnancy wasn't necessarily an accident, she wanted out of her parents house and I wanted out of high school. The situation was handled badly by all, I tried to maintain a relationship secretly (my parents forbid me to see her when they learned of the pregnancy -- like I said, badly). I quit school and got a job cooking chickens for the Colonel. I hung out at her parent's house as much as I could. The pathos of this situation can be summed up by the following anecdote: when Nicole was born, her mother's mother called the house and I just happened to answer the phone. "You have a beautiful daughter named Nicole," she reported. My parents were in the living room watching TV, and since I was forbidden to see the mother, I said nothing. That still has a sting to it, forty-seven years later. A few weeks later, the mother's mother took the phone away from the daughter during one of our conversations and informed me that if I didn't marry the daughter, they would have me sent to the Boys Industrial School or, as it was generally understood, prison for juveniles, or "juvie." I had friends who had been. That ended the relationship two days before Christmas, 1973 -- one year to the day from when the relationship had begun.
I went off the deep end. I moved in with some friends in a duplex apartment in Newton, Kansas and got a job at the tractor cab factory in the Mennonite community of Hesston, Kansas. I hated the job -- spot welding -- it was very "un-me." Drug consumption increased. I had my first profound revelation on LSD, at age seventeen. I lost my job. I got into dealing drugs to support my drug habit. I contracted hepatitis. I went to the hospital where I was told my liver panel said I should be dead. Our apartment was robbed, possibly by one of the residents, and my Fender Mustang bass (I had been in a band before the shit hit the fan), my Plush amplifier, and my homemade speaker cabinets along with my awesome album collection were all stolen. My roommates informed me of this while I was in the hospital with yellow skin, pissing orange and shitting white. This is when my mother dumped a pile of Ayn Rand books on me, thinking it would help. She didn't know what else to do. My dad, a decorated WWII vet, did his best to emulate an authoritarian, but that ship had sailed long before. The biggest impact on me while in the hospital, in addition to having my beloved musical equipmennt and collection stolen, was having the doctor say, in essence, "I don't understand why you're not dead." I knew I had to find some other path than my drug consumption.
Amphetamines were the potential killer. Known as "whites" or "double crosses" to us good little consumers, they killed a number of people in our neck of the woods, both through their toxicity and through the black market craziness associated with it. I had started in with them after the break-up. I went through an intense year of criminal activity that culminated in me moving to Newton and taking the job at the tractor factory. My dad had a heart attack that same year -- 1974 was a bad year in our world.
So after the hepatitis experience, I knew I had to stay off hard drugs and I had never been much of an alcohol drinker. I went to work for my brother, who had moved to town and started up a handyman business: painting, building fences, doing concrete work, roofing, etc. I had tried working for him before, but I was too strung out to make a go of it. In the spring of 1975, facing the street and death on one hand, the other hand looked better. We built fences; we painted houses; we shingled roofs; we installed guttering; we poured concrete. It seemed like we did this for a long time at the time, but upon reflection it was only a couple of months.
There were two endings to this scenario. The first was when the carnival came to town. Ottaway Amusements -- "Everyday's a holiday with Ottaway." I had been selling a little weed to supplement the $1.50 an hour my brother was paying me to make the money to replace my stolen Fender Mustang bass, and I got enough to buy a Fender Precision bass guitar. So, at age 17, it was kind of a watershed moment. A couple of buddies and myself raised the question of whether the carnival might be hiring. We asked and they were. Bob Ottaway hired all three of us, and we went on the road. An amusing anecdote from my first day on the job: I smoked Belair cigarettes, but I usually kept a few joints in my cigarette pack. Well, I was running my ride (it's not hard), and Bob Ottaway came by to relieve me. "Take a little break," he said, "I'll run the ride for a bit." So I headed to the Johnny-on-the-Spot and realized too late that I had left my Belairs sitting on the console of the ride. After relieving myself, I returned to the ride and resumed my job. A few days later, in another town, we had discovered pot plants growing along the railroad right-of-way and decided to check it out. So we cut a few plants and spread them on the roofs of the carnival's box trucks to dry. We thought ourselves clever. Then, in the morning meeting, which happened every morning at 10:00, Bob announced what the day's assignments were as per usual. Then, at the end, he said, "And get those pot plants off the roofs of my trucks before we all end up in jail. And if you have to take a 'Belair break,' do it on your own time." Busted. Two-for-one.
We were all "ride boys" -- tear down and set up and run the rides when the Midway was open. I was on the Sizzler. It was great and lasted for about a month until I realized that the boss was ripping me off. We were paid $15 a day; you could take it all or let it build up. I let it build up, which was a mistake. Ottaway denied that I had let it build up and cheated me out of $50 or more, which was a lot of money to a 17-year-old in 1975. So Smitty and I split -- hitchhiked back to Hays. We were in eastern Kansas outside of Lawrence at that time. In Pomona, come to think of it, which is in the outside arc of Lawrence / Kansas City / Topeka. As I recall, we had encountered a couple of guys selling heroin. It was a rip-off. There was one notable thing about this ending of this first ending of the Harvey Brothers Home Improvement contingency that did not come to fruition. We got a ride on I-70 at Topeka in a box truck that was transporting a car across the country, and there were I think three guys in the back on lawn chairs with a cooler of beer riding with the car. We jumped in with them and headed west. Shortly after, they picked up two more hitchhikers -- these were from Kentucky and it was their first trip west. If you know I-70 in Kansas, you know that about fifty miles west of Salina the country levels out, becomes almost treeless, and is flatter (there have been studies) than a pancake. The jaws of these "K-Y boys" dropped when they saw this, and one asked, "You guys actually grew up out here?" Of course, we thought it normal and thought their response amusing. The carnival was a good experience, and I'm glad I did it. Randy, the third member of our trio, stayed on with the carnival for the rest of the season -- he and Ottaway got along pretty well, apparently. Randy had a great dog named "Sambo," and it made him a fixture at the controls of the Ferris Wheel. Randy and Sambo and the Ferris Wheel; what's not to love about that.
So Smitty and I both went to work for my brother. It was not exactly fun working for my brother. He was pretty stressed out with three kids and another on the way and was, frankly, an angry man. One fine day in the heat of the summer -- probably 105 degrees or so -- we were putting masonite siding on a shed in the backyard of another angry man (they were and still are common in this quarter). Smitty and I were, by the lights of the time and place, "hippies," which put us in conflict with the mainstream culture of western Kansas. Getting beat up for having long hair had been routine until I started wearing a knife on my belt. Bullies are scared shitless, down deep. So Smitty and I were getting bullied by both my brother and the homeowner. Clearly they didn't approve of something, though it was unclear what that was, it was clear that whatever it was it was our fault. Smitty had been talking about how he had visited his sister in Ithaca, New York and how awesome it was; forests, waterfalls, people like us. He had been talking about it for several days. On this hot, miserable day with rednecks yelling at us routinely, I said, "Fuck it, I'm going to Ithaca." Smitty said, "Well, I guess we could take my car." He had a '66 Chevelle with a 283 motor and "three on the tree." We had $110 between us, four bald tires and no spare. We dropped our nail bags at lunchtime, packed our bags and took off for Ithaca, NY. One of the best things I ever did. That was the second of two endings to working for my brother in Hays, Kansas.
We left in mid-afternoon, picked up a couple of hitchhikers right away who had some uppers. We took them to their doorstep in Edwardsville, Illinois, and drove on. I had driven to Edwardsville where Smitty took the wheel. I went to sleep for a few hours and woke up in downtown Columbus, Ohio. We definitely weren't in Kansas anymore and I felt free in ways I had never known. This was especially true as we drove into the Appalachian Mountains. I love mountains -- any mountains -- and the drive from Wheeling to Scranton, when the sun went down, was one I'll never forget. Seventeen years old, having escaped what to me was a prison sentence (working for rednecks who despise you until you drop dead), now flying down the Pennsylvania Turnpike through the Alleghenies -- it was a moment I could carry with me forever as an ally. In Scranton, we stopped at a bar to replenish the cooler, and I walked into my first drag-queen experience. Everyone in the bar was dressed as a woman, and as my eyes adjusted and I ordered two sixpacks to go, I realized all these women were men, or at least most of them. My only experience with anything like this had been being picked up hitchhiking by a gay man in Dallas who put the moves on me. I got out of there fast, although the passenger side door was locked and there was a moment of panic -- I was a sixteen-year-old boy with long hair, and he was obviously attracted to me. He unlocked the door and apologized. And I had inadvertently walked into a gay bar on "the Strip" in Dallas (Lemon Ave.). This Scranton thing was new, however, and my horizons were broadened.
So the sun went down and we meandered down Highway 81, I think it was, through forested hills, curves, fog banks -- things stranged to someone from western Kansas where the trees could be named. We arrived at Ithaca in the middle of the night, parked by Cayuga Lake and went to sleep listening to the Ozark Mountain Daredevlis on our eight-track tape machine. We woke up with the light and drove into town and walked around both the open-air mall downtown and walked up the waterfall trail to Cornell and the university town. I was in heaven, it seemed. People were friendly to a couple of seventeen-year-old longhairs who were disoriented but grateful, all of which were new in our experience. We decided to go for a drive around the countryside, which I don't remember much about, except that on our way back into town there were two girls hitchhiking and we picked them up. "Where you from"? One asked. "Kansas," we replied. "Where are you staying?" "Nowhere." "Well, if you give us a ride home you could probably stay with us." Done and done, as it were. Sadly, I've forgotten their names, but one was fourteen and one was thirteen and the fourteen-year-old's mother was a stripper who was working down in the city. They lived in an A-frame out in the hills with a big garden, three ponds that lay in a series down the mountainside. We ate, because we hadn't eaten since we left Hays, I don't think. We had carrot greens, corn-on-the-cob, and catfish out of the pond. Didn't cost a dime. Another revelation, although we were not new to fishing. We WERE new to the idea that you could live like this. There was an adult present, a step-father sort of figure who was the significant other of the "stripper," and who was a kind fellow who had many projects underway and in the planning stage.
Some readers might be tempted to strike a negative stance toward this situation -- four minors left alone in a cabin in the woods with one older man who didn't seem to be too worried about us. So a little cultural context seems in order. This place was, more or less, just down the road from the Hitchcock Estate at Millbrook, the LSD mecca of the '60s. We were immersed in a culture that was a mixture of hippiedom and the intelligentsia from Cornell. The hippie culture was HUGE at this place. There were several communes; the Hare Krishnas had a mini-festival every afternoon at 5:00 to feed the homeless; lots of buskers; a nudist colony; in other words, it was a world apart from the one we had known. Where we stayed at the little A-frame out in the hills was nice. Smitty and the older girl commenced a sexual relationship. The other girl, who was purported to be Ken Kesey's daughter, and I did not.
The point here is that this threw me out of my old prison mindset that I did not know I was in. I met fourteen-year-olds who had more maturity than we did. It was glaringly obvious that our upbringing had been severely lacking in important details -- most importantly the fact that we were human beings worthy of respect and support in our endeavors. In New York, we visited a commune that was paradisical to me. Situated somewhere near West Danby, one had to walk through the woods for a few hundred yards to reach the farmstead, which was a log cabin, a barn, a chicken coop, a goat shed, big gardens, and about ten to fifteen humans, maybe more because I'm not sure they were all present at our visit. They had a bluegrass band that was rehearsing and was pretty good. It was a functional farm -- we stayed for a big farm-style noontime meal, made up of all home-grown, homemade food. The entree was something they called "Rat-rat-rat Stew." It wasn't "rats," it was some kind of casserole and it was delicious. It was then and there I knew I had to nurture a connection with the earth for the rest of my life. This, I have done.
Sadly, this paradise came to an end. We got paranoid about social workers; Smitty said we could go to Colorado, and that sounded good to me -- I was tired of being broke and there were no work prospects that I could percieve. There probably were, but with only one car, and a dicey one at that, it seemed unworkable. So we left and came back to Kansas with the prospect of leaving for Colorado within a couple of days. A couple of days after our return, Smitty showed up in his brother's Corvette, his brother was driving, and he said, "Sorry, we're taking off and we don't have any room for you." That was heartbreaking. I should have stayed in New York, was my first thought. This was the beginning of an expression I adopted that applied to my interactions with the Schmidt family: I had been "Schmidted," which is to say, screwed.
But the impact had been made, and I was changed. I had seen too much, and I was never going to fit into Hays, Kansas again; not that I ever did. Nothing against the place, I had good times there; but for much of my life I imagined a scenario like the Clint Eastwood flick, High Plains Drifter, where his character shows up in this little town that's scared to death of a guy that's going to get out of prison and come back with has gang to seek revenge. The town hires the "Drifter" to protect them. They give him absolute power. Long story short, he makes the local and thoroughly-bullied midget the Mayor, orders the town painted red and renamed "Hell." Then in the confrontation with the outlaw gang, it burns to the ground. That was a fantasy I had of Hays, Kansas for much of my life: paint it red, rename it "Hell," and burn it to the ground. I don't feel that way anymore. I like the place okay; I work at the university as an online professor; and I don't have to live there. But I don't even mind visiting anymore. But it was literally a "Hell" for me, especially after New York.
I was done working for my brother. So I went back into the dope business, selling pot and LSD to make ends meet. It turned out that Smitty made a good connection in Denver, and I'd go out there and by pounds of pot and bring them back and sell ounces and make a little money. That fall, I moved into a basement apartment with Randy from the carnival days, who had returned, and we spent three months or so as a local LSD headquarters in our little town. Pretty weird times, to say the least. The person who lived upstairs was into barbituates and she had two young children. She was separated from their dad who was mean and crazy and who took a dislike to me -- he thought I was screwing his estranged wife, which I wasn't, although I liked her and we were friends. He ended up smashing out the windshield of the old '57 GMC pickup I had bought from Smitty's dad, although I couldn't prove it, much less do anything about it. This guy was an ex-con and a Vietnam vet who exuded negativity in a major way. He, as they say, harshed my buzz, and was the progenitor of a bad acid trip that was also a life-changing experience. I was sitting in our basement apartment and Stanley J., as he was known, walked into our living room and sat down on the couch. No one ever knocked, people just came and went as the wanted. He was drunk and he sat across the room giving me the evil eye, as if he wanted to kill me. I has seventeen, he was probably twenty-five and twice my size. After a few minutes of that, I literally thought I was in hell. I left pretty shaken up by Stan and the bad acid trip. I went across town to my parents house and woke them up and told them I was having a bad trip and that I was sorry. My dad turned his back on me and went back to bed. My mom stayed up and talked me down. I hallucinated that I was on the inside of a ball at the center of the universe that was lined with faces that had been condemned to hell. I was just another face. It was a drug-induced "psychic emergency" and a fairly mild version compared to the one I experienced at age thirty without drugs. So the acid wore off, of course, but I was rattled. The end result of this three-month excursion through the LSD world was that I decided I needed to find another way to support myself.
In January of 1976, I went to work with Tom and Rex (Rex was the older brother of a friend) pouring concrete. Since these were the western Kansas version of "heads" (people who smoked weed and were pretty mellow, generally, as opposed to redneck "juicers" who were into fighting and bullying). So I commenced to learn a trade -- the concrete business. The best part of that year and a half that I worked with those guys was that we spent a lot of time in the High Plains in what most people would call "the middle of nowhere." But to me, I was one with the sun, wind, and sky and it was great, most of the time. We frequently built foundations for houses and grain silos miles from any significant settlement. Look at a map of western Kansas -- there ain't much out there. On the other hand, that makes it a beautiful place to see the wonders of the other-than-human world.
So this was the beginning of the summer of slow-burn, where something that had come to be called "D___ H_____," raised in an environment where discovering the genuine within was not encouraged or even understood, who had been poisoned by the poison pen of Ayn Rand, and had come to a habitual self-medication with alcohol, melted down to a more genuine piece of the Universe, who I eventually named "Figment Zenguitar." Voila, the "Second Birth."
