4. East Village Rockers

East Village Rockers (updated 6-9,7-11, 7-16 , 
7-22 7-26-14, 7-18-15)

3.              East Village Rockers

Between the blues rock, psychedelic and progressive rock that developed from 1969 to 1971, Johnny never let go of the garage band ethic. While the Doors became household names with L.A. Woman, music like Emerson, Lake, & Palmer got more complicated with playing jazz-rock opuses. Led Zeppelin were becoming hot-shots and losing their edge. Johnny couldn’t handle the detail. The bands he played with were still in the garage; they wouldn’t dream of Madison Square Garden or being on TV shows, even if they could. Johnny’s mind was in the streets, his guts were in the gutter, Iggy & The Stooges were taking the rooms that The Doors were closing.

The drug you chose determined the crowd you joined and the music you liked. The Stilettos were at the Bobern Tavern in Manhattan playing girl group covers. Jimmy Bianca saw the ad in the voice looking for a keyboard player for a new group with the goal of becoming famous. That was what he told Johnny when Johnny asked him if he would join their band, Holy Shit; Holy Shit were going nowhere, Jimmy said. He applied for and got a job joining Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in Manhattan. Meanwhile, intelligent white hard-core drug users in Manhattan were digging The New York Dolls. Johnny was impressed and went to see them at the Mercer Arts Center while the glue-sniffers and downer-poppers were too zonked to recognize anything with format. It was the winter of 1974.

It was 1974. It was a cold January Wednesday and Johnny was off from work until 4pm. He took the subway to Manhattan and got off at 48^th Street, Manny’s Guitar Center, looking for a new Shure Unidyne microphone; He had demolished his last one on the floor of the Quonset hanger at the show at the downtown Brooklyn College campus.

In the store at the time were some strange looking customers, punk looking dudes; long hair, looking around, too.

“You guys in a band?” asked Johnny Livewire

“What’s it to you?” said a guy who introduced himself as Johnny Cummings

“I’m looking for a band that looks like you do,” said Johnny looking at the long black hair a tall skinny dude with sunglasses.

“We’re looking for guitars; why? Do you play?” said the guy who called himself Dee Dee.

Johnny Cummings held a blue Mosrite and Dee Dee a DanElectro bass. “We got this guy Joey (Jeff Hyman) on drums from a glam band called Sniper. We’re starting a band.”

“Do you need a singer?” asked Johnny Livewire.

“Nah, we all sing,” said Dee Dee. “We don’t need that.” They walked away to pay for their guitars

“What’s your band’s name?”

“The Ramones,” called Johnny Cummings over his shoulder. Johnny figured, with a name like that, they were going to play pop music.

The little orange pill put on his tongue; ‘Sunshine’ it was called. The hope of a bright new day was its promise, even if it was at darkening dusk. Johnny took a handful of water from the bathroom spigot and washed it down. He didn’t want it getting stuck in his throat. He didn’t want it unhinging his tongue as it did in Bananafish Park during The Hot Tuna Festival. He didn’t want it encumbering his speech. He didn’t want to lose his voice. He wanted to sing. He liked to sing. He sang everywhere he went. He sang along.

The air outside was hot on this mid-summer evening. It was a good beach day if Johnny had felt like going, if he hadn’t woken up at 2pm after falling asleep at 6am after a night of playing the park on New Utrecht Avenue and 7oth Street and hanging out, first with Ferine and later with the crowd at the Square, finally, settling down to smoke with Sal and Tony in the school yard before mutually agreeing to go home; Johnny only had to cross the street to fall into bed. It would have been a good day for Brighton Beach, Bay One, where the smokers laid their blankets.

Johnny dressed deliberately. He found his favorite unmarked black t-shirt to frame long wavy brown hair on his shoulders, located black jeans, black leather belt, silver buckled, the clothes he washed with the family laundry in the apartment building basement wash room. He completed his look with black canvass sneakers white rubber trimmed on black socks; he was almost set for his ride. One more thing; he clipped onto the right side of his pants buckle side loops between his front and back pocket, the cassette player, He could press ‘stop’ or ‘play’ while riding in an instant or even ramp up the volume at a touch. What an invention! He was going for a bike ride.

The 10 speed bicycle Johnny had wasn’t the best but at least it got him around, to Ferine’s home or down to band practice at David Famili’s garage. It stood on a kickstand in the foyer near the entrance of his mom’s apartment. No hat or helmet on this head; just brushed back brow, below the ear sideburns, fresh facial hair, and a virgin mustache. He slipped the filled water bottle in the holder under the seat bar, unlocked the door, and backed the bike out into the hallway of the building heavy with echoed voices of a family that had just walked in. Kick-stand down, he searched his right front pocket for the key and the door was locked, That done, the key returned to its pocket, bike backed up for forward trajectory carried down the five original white marble steps, one cracked, to the lower lobby. Through the inner lobby door he went to square Greek vestibule with greenish grimy broken buzzers on two walls for each apartment therein, unused for decades. Once he cleared the outer door, down two more steps, Johnny was outside in the building’s tiny courtyard entrance. Left foot to the peddle, pushing off with the right foot, mounting the moving bike never bothering to leave the sidewalk past the garbage can atrium down the driveway drop from the first private garage and onto the street. It had been fifteen minutes since he downed the acid. He noticed a slight tightening in his jaw behind the rear molars.

Up to 6^th Avenue where there’d be less traffic. Ten minutes later he hit his first red light at 60^th Street. He was shocked to think that he had forgotten his earphones. There they were, in the left front pocket coiled in a black coiling device, He had selected two cassettes for this trip, one in the Walkman chamber, “Abby Road.” The second, in a crystal jewel case in the left front pocket, “The Supremes.” The black pocket with gray lining was starting to fray from the ins and outs of his hand. No loose change in that left front pocket because of a hole at the bottom, a hole he played with and made bigger. He’d sewn the hole up in the front right pocket where he now carried his change. Johnny needed to be like a boy scout when going out tripping. Everything needed to be prepared and in its proper place before he lost his mind when he started peaking. He had to be ready. He was getting there soon.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers,” he’d read in a Faulkner novel. Johnny knew he was believing; when you’re on acid, all you can do is believe. Remembering is impossible. Acid takes you where you want to go but it looks differently there from the way you remembered it and never like you thought it would be. Better to not rely on memory when the speed hits the solar plexus. It was starting to hit. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was starting to hit. Right at Leif Erikson Park, down the declining winding tree-lined road of Leif Erikson Parkway, winding to make it feel more like a park than a way. At the Owl’s Head Sewerage Plant it makes a radical left under the Gowanus overpass and heads west alongside Belt Parkway at the 69^th Street Pier. “I want you, dot dot dot… I want you so bad, dot dot dot dot…. I want you –ooh-ooh. dot dot dot… I want you so bad, it’s driving me mad, it’s driving me mad,” sang John Lennon as Johnny hit the straightway entering the bike path along New York Harbor. He was starting to peak. Later, the bike path passed, five hundred feet under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Johnny had arrived. Nothing would be the same that night. The world became props in an open-eyed dream; it would stay that way until the crack of dawn with his balls, clammy in his undershorts, numb, feeling like a little bag of hot sand, brushing against something soft and fleshy in between. Johnny dismounted the bike finding a spot on a patch of grass under the long roadway above, bending like a long gray rainbow, lights shining on the water from the bridge.

“Ahhh ahhh-ahhh- ahhh…” Diana Ross moaned in harmony with the Supremes and Temptations. Johnny thought it was hysterical; he couldn’t stop laughing out loud. People strolling by and bike riders on the path below wondered where the laughter was coming from but they couldn’t see Johnny who was sitting on the ground behind the tall grass and weeds on the slope leading up to the looping curve of the 4^th Avenue entrance to the Belt Parkway, the curve that looks like you’re car is going to fly right into the Narrows. He couldn’t make the earphones from the walkman loud enough and cupped his hands over them on his ears.

Over the whoosh of the cars, Johnny sang along, “Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you babe.” It was incredible how the music knew exactly how Johnny was feeling or was it that the acid helped Johnny feel the music? As he sang, tiny flecks of multi-colored hummingbirds darted under the Verrazano Bridge swooping to form a bright light halo glittering on the water across to Staten Island. An enormous container ship plied its way upstream under the bridge defying gravity towards Manhattan as the relentless tide pushed south emptying the East River and Hudson into the Atlantic.

Johnny Livewire gazed down the slope passed the path to the dilapidated wooden dock to the left of the bridge, a dock left to rot by the Fort Hamilton military base across the parkway. A rusted steel shell of a boat was for years grounded on a spit of beach exposed during low tide off the bulkhead. Johnny fingered the scars on his calf from the barnacles that tore into his flesh one summer night not long ago when he, a show-off, jumped into the Narrows for a swim; he was almost dragged out to open sea that night if it weren’t for him swimming back for his life and clutching a pylon of the pier despite the barnacles that lacerated his leg. Under the influence, the scars seemed so deep that Johnny swore, in his hallucinatory logic, he could feel his bone. “No, it couldn’t be so,” he said to reassure himself so he wouldn’t flip out on the acid. Everything was going to be alright; the music was still playing. It was time to move on.

Johnny mounted his bicycle and rode along the worn groove of soil on the side of the parkway entrance back down to the dark unlit path along Caesar’s Bay as rats scampered across or hesitated in the shadows down to the breakers holding sewerage and tossed trash. He had the dries. “Dyker Park; maybe find a water fountain that works there.” Johnny got to the overpass and walked his bike up to the park and play field alongside the Veterans’ Hospital on a mission to get a drink, a psychedelic mission to find what he never expected he’d see: two young men about his age playing soccer near the baseball fields. The game was there for him to join, on his trip to partake. From a bench near a working water fountain, the long-haired rock singer watched feeling the good cold water that burned his lip; he couldn’t swallow. He gurgled and it dripped onto his hands as two teenage boys glanced over wondering what the heck he was dong sitting there staring at them all alone under the pink vapor lights. They didn’t like the idea of some befuddled dope watching them and when Johnny asked if he could play with them, they thought they heard wrong. Johnny thought perhaps they were immigrants from the mostly Italian neighborhood and repeated himself as he stood to join them.

“”You want to play, huh?” The other boy gave Johnny a whack on his shoulder from behind and Johnny wheeled around. The first boy kicked Johnny in the thigh when he was turned. “What’s the matter with you? You fuckin’ high on something?” Johnny turned to face the punter and the other boy boxed his ear, punched his cheek while the first one tripped him and made him fall. Johnny on the glass strewn ground with ripped pants sat dazed as the boy went for his bicycle.

“That’s my bike!” Johnny cried out and tried to stand up. The three of them with hands on different parts of the bicycle pulled and pushed to wrestle the bike away. These soccer players were really drunks kicking around an empty bottle of beer. At long last he got his bike away from them and rode away as fast as he could peddle with two drunk punks laughing and screaming at him to get the fuck back there so they could beat the shit out of him. Johnny panted hard without looking back measuring the distance between them from the loudness of their screams. 

He didn’t stop riding until he was at 14^th Avenue and 86^th Street across from the 19^th Hole Tavern. There he assessed the damage: one ripped pant leg, some blood smeared on his hand probably from touching his scraped knee, and a bent rear bicycle wheel that was making squeaking noises as he made his get-away. His ears were ringing but where was the music? His earphones were gone no doubt ripped from his ears during the ruckus. At least his walkman was still there by virtue of a belt loop that kept it stable. “I had better head home,” he thought. It was the only thing to do so he walked the bike with a wheel like that back home to the edge of Sunset Park. He wondered if what was happening was really happening; he decided it was.

Johnny had no idea what time it was. When he left home, it was light, and he’d seen the sunset off the 69^th Street Pier, but it was dark now and had been so since riding along the bay to the Verrazano. He had played through two cassettes, both sides, at least ninety minutes; he was out longer than that. As he walked he notice some people still outside their houses; even some young people. He saw from the street sign that he was on 72^nd Street. He saw some people down the block. “Doesn’t Mark live around here?” he thought. “Those people may be his friends,” he surmised, “Maybe even Mark himself!” A few days before on a visit to a friend he had met Mark who he hoped would be his future drummer.

He walked his bike down the street without giving a thought to what he looked like; long disheveled brown hair and moustache, face with filthy blood smeared cheeks, torn shirt and pant legs, squeaking bicycle wheel; the young folk he approached could see he was a mess.

“Hey man, you don’t know a Mark Cooper, do you?”

“Mark who?”

“Cooper. Mark Cooper.”

“You’re not from around here, are you?” The young teenage girls who had gathered to see the spectacle slowly inched away but kept looking.  

“I’m lost man, I’m lost.”

“You don’t know where you are?”

“No. I know where I am but I don’t know where I live.” The girls within earshot broke into a trot and went home to their houses.

“What?” The neighborhood teens laughed nervously. One asked, “Where do you live?”
     “Brooklyn. 9^th Avenue. But I’m not sure which way it is. May I stay here and rest a while?”

“Sure, dude, but we have to go now. It’s late,” They waved Johnny good bye. Johnny stood alone on the tree-lined street for what must have been hours. Somehow, before dawn, he managed to find his way back home.  

New York City, to Johnny Livewire, was starting to feel like what happened to the flower power generation after the Altamont Concert. What had been all hopeful and Woodstock-like from his first hit of weed to his kaleidoscope of girlfriends’ affection, to the bands he was in getting some professional attention and even to the part-time union job in the appetizing department of a supermarket, the one that would enable him to afford a car and his own studio apartment, all were “Woodstock” events hopeful with future possibilities of endless skies. Then, something went wrong; someone let the Hell’s Angels lose in his world and, like the Rolling Stones on stage, there was nothing he could do to stop them from killing an innocent man. Johnny Livewire started to take a beating.

He didn’t know why the promoter didn’t see Holy Shit’s potential. He didn’t know why Jimmy Desire was rewarded with fame after he torched Johnny’s hair. He had let bygones be bygones when he saved Jimmy from being swished jumping out the Bananafish Park bathroom window. Whatever happened to that “Instant Karma” that John Lennon was singing about? Why was it that Patti Smith became famous when it was clear to Johnny that he had as much talent as she had as a poet and was a much better singer, too? His life was becoming mundane, sedated by drugs, but he told himself to be patient; to live with it. Ferine, his steady girlfriend, could see that Johnny was dipping into depression downing more downers and ingesting fewer psychedelics 

Ferine could see the reflection of Johnny in the condition of his bicycle. He had escaped on it from the soccer hoodlums at Dyker Park but it was scratched up, the wheel was bent, and the gears no longer worked smoothly. For months he had been taking two buses to Ferine’s home, sometimes walking the five miles and beating the bus there as infrequent as they were. He was even having a harder time getting it up for Ferine, an intolerable byproduct of the depression and drugs.

Ferine had a good idea; an exchange of birthday gifts and a graduation gift for Johnny who was finishing high school. “I’ll buy you a new bicycle and you buy me one, How about that?”

“I want a Peugeot; a white Peugeot,” Johnny moaned.

“And so do I,” said Ferine excitably. She envisioned to him a side by side ride up the Ocean Parkway bike path to the Prospect Park zoo. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Johnny moaned. “And we can find a nice secluded spot,” she whispered, “to suck your big hot cock.” Johnny moaned.

“And why wait until our birthdays when the summer will be half over; let’s get them now!” Ferine said and jumped up excitedly.

“I guess we could go to Weber’s and pay on time,” Johnny was lightening up. “Okay. Let’s go to Weber’s this Sunday and put in our order.” To Weber’s they went, Weber, an orthodox Jew with a bicycle shop across from the shuttered Borough Park Theater under the el on 51^st Street. Johnny had seen a white ten-speed Peugeot there recently. There was even a smaller female version with a low bar for a girl to gracefully get on without having to mount it like a cowboy.

By the time graduation day came and school was out for the summer, even forever, the bicycles were paid up, delivered, assembled, and ready to ride. That first Monday with no school, it poured all day. Their side by side ride would have to wait until Ferine got back from a Fourth of July weekend with her family in Red Hook. Johnny had a lot of time on his hands and he couldn’t wait to ride. He would blow a joint and get on that shiny new bike for a ride to Manhattan, Washington Square Park.

July Fourth was one of those special New York City summer days with plenty of asphalt sucking heat and no wind to blow it away, even in Brooklyn. Kids in the neighborhoods knew what to do on such a day: open up the fire hydrants with big old wrenches and dance in the streets in torrents of freezing cold water. Splash the passing cars, whether they wanted a wash or not. Watch the old passengers in buses frantically trying to close their windows before the kids could aim their water at the openings with garbage can lids

Johnny took off for the two hour ride, long wavy hair tied back in a pony tail, short cut black jeans, maroon t-shirt and Converse All-Stars with white athletic socks folded over the laces so they wouldn’t get tangled in the peddles, an official factory-made Peugeot canteen of water in the holder, up the hump of Sunset Park and a right down the slope at Fourth Avenue, a straight four-lane left on Prospect Avenue and into Hamilton Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway; right on Hicks Street. He followed Hicks Street alongside the submerged Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to Atlantic Avenue, left and down along the piers at Furman Street to Old Fulton and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Ah, the gallons of fresh water, a new gush across every cross street, a new gang of neighborhood teens splashing a participating bicyclist with their joyous summer flood, cold Catskill wine and wet again; what a thrill! Carry the bike up the steps and you’re there on the smooth cement path that turns into rickety wooden board that thump in time like music to the ridden over. Ride up the incline and around the anchorage to the main span. What better place to rest and have a smoke than mid-span on a Brooklyn Bridge bench with East River breezes blowing away any evidence? Woodstock was overtaking Altamont again.

Johnny glided down the loose wooden slats on the Manhattan side of the bridge dodging tourists taking photos of the famous Manhattan skyline with their backs to Brooklyn. The boards become cement at the anchorage straight down to City hall Park, right at Church Street that turns into Avenue of the Americas. At St. Marks Place, turn right and Washington Square Park is right there.

 Johnny was feeling high in Washington Square Park watching folks playing chess, children hoping in and out of the pool around the fountain with parents casually sitting nearby. Elderly citizens sat on benches on either side of the arch near Good Humor ice cream carts, shaved ice stands, fruit drinks vendors, and music, everywhere music, music from guitars, a steel kettle drum, and further out an NYU student practicing clarinet, a Broadway musician playing his violin. The park was filled with smells of incense from Hare Krishna followers and the sweet smell of ganja; not a pig in sight.

Johnny walked his bicycle over to a group of young long-haired men and found a place to sit on the ledge. They passed around a joint casually to Johnny who took it all in then passed it on. He’d just men these young men but already he felt like he’d known them for years; that’s the way it was with hippies and that’s what weed will do to you.

“Hey man, would you like a fruit drink? I know the man. Hey, boss, give my friend here lemonade.” What a contagious scene of love, how bright life was when you were in the Tao, so unlike the old folks they were, Johnny thought. They were something new. They didn’t quite know what it was or particularly cared; they just ‘did it.’

“Hey man, cool bike,” one of his new friends remarked, Johnny shaking his head proud that he noticed. “Hey man, you wouldn’t mind if I took a quick ride around the park, would you?”

“Sure, check it out,” Johnny nonchalantly said, then flinched unconsciously wrapping his mind around the phantom idea of communalism for a second. It was natural that everyone brought what they had to share in the Age of Aquarius. He saw the anonymous friend weave the bicycle around the outside paths of the park, out of sight, and then back through the trees to the fountain, and then he weaved out of sight again. It was only a few minutes, he thought and the other young men had moved on and wandered off the ledge It was so peaceful in the city park and fifteen minutes had passed. Johnny stood up thinking he saw the man on his bike talking with someone near a distant tree but it wasn’t him; it wasn’t his bike.

At thirty minutes the dusk was gathering in the sky but it was dawning on Johnny, the dream was over, the nightmare was racing in his heart, from Woodstock to Altamont, paranoia striking deep, The shadows in the park met lazy days head on as the last shimmer of golden sun slid from the reflecting town house windows and the children found their parents heading home. Johnny spun around slowly in a 360^o last look, head lowered, walked to the IND subway. “Before wild Medusa’s serpents gave birth to hell disguised as heaven, those were the days.”

At the new college in September, Johnny stood on the quad a week before registration tossing a Frisbee with friends. A young man on a blue bicycle rode up to the edge of the grass and called out. “IS anyone interested in buying a bicycle?” Johnny paid attention.

“Let me see it,” The young man got off the bike and walked it over to Johnny who looked it over. “How much you want?”

“$50 would be okay,” said the young thief

”Why are you selling your bike?” Johnny asked suspiciously

“Oh, it’s not mine. I found it in the backyard of a house.”

“Really? May I try it out?” asked Johnny innocently.

“Sure,” said the backyard bike thief

He never saw Johnny Livewire again

Meeting Jacker at the Kingsborough Quonset hut student union was a stroke of luck for Johnny. Jaker and Johnny hit it off right away. Johnny, who was the DJ at the Kingsborough radio station was listened to and admired by Jaker who could pick up the signal of progressive blues rock as far away as Dyker Park. When he heard Johnny talking with a friend over the pool table, he recognized his voice right away.

“Hey, you’re the morning DJ, Johnny Livewire, aren’t you,” said Jacker like he met a real V.I.P.

“That’s right kiddies, you’re in tune with the world of rock ‘n’ roll; WKRB 90.9 FM Kingsborough.”

“Hey man, I like the stuff you play.”

“Ha-ha; so do I!”

Johnny’s long hair was like his badge; everyone on campus knew who he was. Johnny didn’t mind waking up early to take the 8-10am shift before classes. That and the odor of weed drifting off his denim jacket gave him away. Everyone, even the school security guards, knew Jacker, too. He was the best pot dealer on campus.

“Hey man, I’m heading home. Could I give you a lift?” said Jacker putting change into the soda machine slot.

“On the edge, man, the edge of Borough Park.” Johnny said as he aimed and shot the seven ball into the side pocket. His playing partner grabbed it as soon as it entered the pocket and returned it to holder on the side of the table so they could shoot again for free.

“Which edge?”

“On the edge of Bay Ridge, dude.”

“Oh cool,” I’m from the Italian edge near 60^th Street and New Utrecht Avenue.” Jacker said as he lit a cigarette.

In the late model GTO with automatic windows and eight-track player, Johnny joined Jacker who parked on the street off campus, slipped Bloodwyn Pig into the chamber, and were on their way with a roar. By the time they exited the Belt Parkway at Dyker Park near the V.A. hospital, they were as high as the kites on the Kings Bay Promenade. They started talking about music while toking on the largest joint Johnny had ever seen; the size of a Te Amo cigar! Johnny gasped as he noticed Jacker snuffing out the one inch roach in the ashtray filled to the brim with a half dozen others. Johnny felt like asking Jacker if he could pocket the roaches but that wouldn’t have been cool to ask.

“Hey man, do you play any instruments?”

“Sure do. I’m the vox, bro.”

“A fuckin’ singer, ay? Sing what you play on the air at Kingsborough?”

“Sure do; man, blues, blues rock, and harp.”

“Hey man. I’m in a blues band that’s been looking for another singer. Are you interested?”

“Fuckin’ ay!” Jacker explained that they had a chick singer who had an attitude and the band was getting sick of her antics, throwing fits, coming in late to practices…

      “Sounds cool. Where do you practice?”

      “Store front on the corner of Bay Ridge Avenue and New Utrecht, Thursday evenings.” Jacker spotted a police car and closed the windows so the smoke wouldn’t drift their way.

      “Come by next Thursday then. Bring a tape with a few songs you’d like to do and we’ll learn them. Hey man, do you have any originals?

      “”Sure as hell,” said Johnny glad that Jacker asked and he had a chance to sing his own tunes besides others.

      “Hey man do you want these roaches?” Jacker pointed to the ashtray.

      “Hell yes! Thanks.” Johnny was on his way to his fourth band of the year.

      The transition to Brooklyn College brought Johnny Livewire in touch with lifestyles he never knew existed, distinctions in direction he never thought he would take. What exactly did it mean being sentimental, being artistic, and being here now? The world was changing. Cordless phones were replacing land lines. Computer games were starting to show up in pub game rooms. Johnny had had his last LSD trip; he knew he had reached the end in a telepathic conversation with a fellow tripper in Prospect Park. Literature, the unconscious, the psychedelic world, and Eastern mysticism were explored in junior college and Johnny was internalizing what he had learned. How would it affect his blues rock persona? He hadn’t played in a band in almost a year though he was a spectator at many concerts, a record buyer who preferred the sound on vinyl to the new cassettes and 8-track tapes. Were his active rock ‘n’ roll days over? His writing, though lyrical, was no longer musical. Johnny was enlightened. The words of Chinese Tang and Song Dynasty poets held more interest to him than Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, or Jim Croce lyrics. He dug Cold Mountain poems. Timothy Leary led the way from LSD into Tibetan Buddhism. “The effect is so similar, and the message is the same,” thought Johnny. The deeper Johnny looked, the more there was to see. His eyes were opened to the wisdom of the ages; Transcendental Superconscious Vision. The Upanishads. What, if anything, did it have to do with his sexuality? Johnny wanted to know. What would happen after you turned off your mind, relaxed, and floated downstream?

      The crowd at Brooklyn College that hung out on the Quad was new. Arthur, James, Mark, and through them, Bill, were on Johnny’s horizon. Ferine and Johnny had parted ways in junior college at Kingsborough but agreed to be friends when they met up again at Brooklyn College. Ferine had a whole new crowd she was hanging out with, Alan, an old friend who joined Hare Krishna, introduced Robert, brothers Harry and Harvey, and Dickey, the only guy he knew who loved The Ramones and punk rock.

The Jolly Bull Pub soothed Johnny’s soul. A block from The Junction where Nostrand Avenue crosses Flatbush, a block away from Brooklyn College was the place where the students went to decompress. Johnny became a whiz at this new game in town, a computer game called Dots. For hours he would stand in front of a glowing picture tube at the top of a machine filled with yellow dots on a black background. A toggle switch in his hand controlled a paddle that moved to the left or right at the bottom of the screen. One yellow dot which bounced off the edges of the picture tube appeared when you threw in a quarter. The objective of the game was to move the paddle so that the roving dots extinguished the dots on the screen.

With beer up to his ears and smoke in his lungs, Johnny wooed the bar crowd, even a buxom brunette named Candy. The juke box played on and Candy moved closer. Another computer video game, meant for two, was a sit-down ping pong table. Candy and Johnny played on till two o’clock when the Jolly Bull put lights out. He walked her home to her mom’s apartment on Newkirk, stopping and kissing along the way under the shade of tall Brooklyn maples. Then he took the bus back to the western edge of Borough Park to his apartment with his mom.

With a treasure trove of a thousand dollars saved from the delicatessen, Johnny felt it was time to put his money to use and find a place of his own where he could go when he felt he was coming down. There, he would do his best to ensure his friends would feel secure if they came. His mother had pushed him to the brink with her nagging about loud music and staying out late. The door never slammed with his earphones filled with a whole lot of Led Zeppelin way down inside. And it was never too late with the alarm clock he never set.

On the sidewalk he stood waiting for the bus with a piece of paper in his hand that he fidgeted with and replaced into his jeans pocket. He peered down 18^th Avenue and saw the bus to college not a few blocks away, but when the bus arrived he wasn’t getting off at the stop for school.

Lining up to get on the bus, a young lady who had gotten off the 50^th Street bus with him to transfer stood. He noticed her lean figure and boyish hair cut. He noticed the acne on her cheeks, the glasses on her nose, and the sweat on the nape of her neck but, most of all, he noticed the spine of a book that showed through the top of her peasant satchel draped over her shoulder; Journey to Ixtlan, by Carlos Castaneda. 

“Great book, right?” he said loudly, for its shock value as she waited to hand the bus driver her paper transfer. She turned and looked.

“Are you talking to me?”

“Why yes! I love Carlos Castaneda.

“Yeah, me too,” she said with a slight giggle and straightening her glasses sliding off her nose. Inside the bus she took one of the double seats which faced forward behind the door towards the back. Johnny walked in behind her and slowly closed in. She smiled up at him and removed the bag she had placed on the seat next to her.

“May I?” asked Johnny and she nodded with a glowing smile as he sat down beside her. She was thrilled, he could tell. “What page are you up to?”

“149; where Jon Juan is stuffing the lizard.

“Do you know what the lizard is for?”

“No. What?”

“I won’t tell you. I’ll ruin the book for you if I do.”

“Okay, I see,” she giggled again and asked him his name. He told her and she told him hers.

“Where are you heading?” she asked to make conversation.

“I’m going to look for a place of my own to live in while I go to Brooklyn College.”

“Really? I’ve been looking for a place, too!”

“You don’t say! What a coincidence.”

“What kind of place are you going to look at?”

“I don’t know; I haven’t been there, yet. A studio. Hey, would you like to come and check it out with me? If I don’t like it, maybe you might.” Johnny was spontaneous, and so was Diane. He was somewhat surprised when the young lady on the bus said “yes.” He reached into his pocket to take out the slip of paper. “Next stop.”

It was off Ditmas Avenue, a block from Flatbush. They got off together from the stop on Foster Avenue and walked down the side street passed Ditmas; a dead end street it was, a street that had seen glorious times forty years ago when the neighborhood was middle class white and the Andrew Sisters were singing at the Lowe’s Kings on Flatbush a few blocks away. Now the street was disheveled and filled with dealer slouching on corners. The rent was $140 a month for the fourth floor walk-up. The hedges around the courtyard entrance were barely leafed and the stench of wet organic waste filled the air. The pre-war brown brick building wasn’t much to look at from the outside but when the burley superintendent found the key and brought them up, they were sold; they both loved it.

“Why not?” You could sleep against one wall and I could sleep on the other side.”

“Okay,” she giggled, I like that.”

“Now, we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, remember; only roommates.”

“Okay,” she replied.

“If you want to bring someone up, I’ll scram.”

“You could have Friday evening and I could have Saturday evening.” They were sold.

They both shook hands in exaggerated agreement and went down to the super’s apartment to sign the leaser together and leave a one-month deposit.

It was only a month into the fall term when Johnny invited Candy to come visit him in his new apartment a ten minute walk from the Brooklyn College campus. Coincidentally, Candy’s apartment with her parents was a few blocks in between. It was a Saturday evening and he had cleared it with Diane in advance. He didn’t think anything of the night he and Diane had made love to christen their new apartment.

Candy brought her St. Bernard with her, her watch dog. It took a little time for Johnny to get comfortable, but comfortable it was, Candy lying on the Indian carpet Johnny had moved from his bedroom, Johnny lying on Candy who smelled like roses and tasted like her namesake. Her largeness engrossed him in desire he hadn’t measured, her eyes twinkled even in the dim light of the small studio foyer. Then, there was a knock at the door, and a ring of the bell almost concurrently. The St. Bernard got up from the spot he lay and started woofing at the door. After Candy calmed him down, she removed her clothes and left for the bathroom. She returned dressed and grabbed the dog’s leash firmly twisting the leather strap around her fist. Johnny dressed and answered the door. There was no answer to his requested “who is it?” He opened the door. There stood Diane, sullen, unhappy, not talking or moving.

“Hi Diane. What are you doing here?”
“It’s my apartment, too, you know.”

“But we had an agreement. It’s Saturday night.” There was no response. “

“I think I’d better leave.”

“I’m sorry Candy. Would you mind? I’ll call you later.”

“No problem,” said Candy and smiled to Diane saying goodbye as she walked out the door.

“Diane, that was not cool.”

“I’m not happy,” she said straight faced as she walked in on the Indian rug without removing her shoes, another house rule broken. She then reached down and took a half-full bottle of beer turning it over so the liquid splashed onto the carpet between them.

“Are you crazy? What the hell are you doing?”

“I don’t want that woman in here anymore.”

“What? Now come on, Diane; that’s why I rented this apartment. So I can bring girlfriends over.”

“I don’t want to see that woman here again.” Again, Diane turned the bottle over and began to pour the beer onto the carpet. Johnny grabbed her hand and they wrestled for a moment until Diane and he fell onto the mattress on the floor. “”I’ll kill you,” he said, and he wasn’t joking at the moment.

“Kill me. Go ahead!” screamed Diane, seriously, tempting him. Johnny came to his senses. He stood up over her as she cowered on the mattress. “Diane, I think this is the end of our arrangement.”

“Okay, so you move out.”

“Me? Why me? I was coming to see this apartment first when you joined me.”

“So?”

“SO, it’s my apartment. You have to move out, not me.” That night Johnny left the studio and stayed at a friend’s off-campus dorm room not far away. When he returned to the studio the following night, all Diane’s belongings were gone. She had moved out, never to be seen again.

“Here’s that sake. Hide it. Wouldn’t it be funny if someone passed by and saw us?”

“It is an open garden. If someone does come by, let us just offer him (or her) a taste.”

Childs placed the two little pale blue porcelain cups on the Basho book he had brought. The lawn was splashed with cherry blossom petals that had drifted off the paths the week before after a nor’easter, beyond them lay the Shinto shrine in the lake of the Japanese Garden. The weather was warm so Johnny sat on the jacket he had brought. The dampness of the wet lawn seeped through to his jeans. He had brought the jacket to conceal at the entrance the bottle of sake he brought. Childs brought the cups and the poetry, and a couple of joints. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden was empty on this week day morning. Only a class of elementary students on a field trip with their escorts could be seen near the vegetable garden. Perhaps they were on their way to the Brooklyn Museum. The landscape was so narrow, one could see from one side to the other.

Childs read first, into their third cup, the three lines of haiku, a line at a time, word by delicious word, the silence speaking volumes in between. It might be another cup or two before it sunk in. Often, they both realized the image at the same time, in the same way, and it was wonderment how. It was the master who wrote the haiku.

Outside, in Brooklyn, an ambulance siren moved along Flatbush Avenue, left to right in Johnny’s ears, right to left in Childs’ as they sat facing each other, the Doppler-shift, just the same. The trickling stream meandered by, even a tadpole or turtle, in the middle of Brooklyn. The lawn, freshly trimmed, released fragrant chlorophyll into the air. Johnny and Childs closed eyes danced, their legs crossed in lotus position.

Just the week before, one evening after classes, Arthur sat just like that on the Indian rug in Johnny’s studio. It was Hereford’s Cow that they had drunk; fine Columbian weed. Arthur loved Asian poetry, too. Arthur raised his slender head and looked tenderly at his college friend. “Johnny, I like you.” Johnny held the smoke from the joint in his lungs until he squeezed every speck of THC out of it before exhaling and replying, “I like you, too.”

“No, I mean I really like you,” said Arthur more intently.

“I really like you too, man,” and Johnny felt Arthur’s hand slink onto his thigh. He tried to ignore it. A long minute went by, the Grateful Dead record played “Dark Star,” the hand remained and started caressing him.

“May I suck you?”

“You may. I’m not going to enjoy it but if it makes you happy, go ahead.”

“It makes me happy because I want to please you. You are a nice person, Johnny. Very nice.”

“Thank you Arthur, I like you too, but not in that way.”

“What do you mean ‘in that way’?” Arthur was still caressing Johnny’s thigh and moving his hand up to his crotch. “We should ‘be here now,’ Johnny, like Baba Ram Dass says. Just exist in the moment.”

“At this moment, I won’t enjoy being sucked by you, do you understand?”

Arthur removed his hand from Johnny’s thigh, abruptly, and stood up. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“So am I.” said Johnny as Arthur went to put on his jacket.

“I thought you were different.”

“So did I of you. I like you, Arthur, but not in that way.”

“Goodbye Johnny, I hope you don’t regret this.”

The years gone by, Johnny recreated sex magic with Ferine. Cutting out of high school, He and Ferine got off the train at the Prospect Park station. They strolled, arm in arm, through the old echo underpass behind the carousel and across the bridge between the Lake House and zoo, in a clearing, they smoked a joint. He downed a tab of acid. Ferine wasn’t there for haikus, only Irish-Italian American mints. He lay down and they kissed, then he opened his pants zipper as Ferine looked around for spectators and did her mouth magic to conjure up and his minty flavor. He was glad to come before he went limp and his scrotum filled with hot wet sand of hallucination. They retraced their steps through another time in the colonial Lefferts House before crossing Flatbush Avenue and entering the Botanic Garden.

Johnny loved the foliage and flowers. Ferine though it was a boring place. “I’ve got to pee,” she said as Johnny examined the lotus in the ponds in front of the hothouse. She started to walk to the entrance.

“It’s not free to go in there, I think,” Johnny heard himself saying though he wasn’t sure how loudly it came out. He said it again, the wakes splashing off the walls in his influenced mind. “I’ll pay,” he heard himself say, in the simplest haiku.

Ferine stood at the door talking to a guard and then walked in, free. Johnny conversed with the lotus flowers atop the pads . He liked what the flowers had to say to him. They thanked him for visiting and said “Fair thee well” when Ferine came out of the building and said she was ready to get out of there.”Come on; it’s getting laid,” he thought he heard her say.

The Botanic Garden Station on the Franklin Avenue Shuttle was a throw-back to the old New York with its boardwalk extensions from the tiled middle station. All around were trees and bushes; not a building in sight. Johnny leaned on the sign that said “crossing or entering upon the tracks is forbidden” and had a cigarette. The drifts of smoke rings he exhaled did summersaults dispersing in the breeze. He observed how the ash aglow at the tip resembled lava rocks from a volcano and didn’t notice the shadowy figure at the other end of the platform.

“Johnny, put the cigarette out; I think I see a cop on the other side.”

“So what of it; a fucking cop!” Johnny peered over Ferine’s shoulder and began to oink and snort loudly. He didn’t realize how loud he was; the acid had affected his aural fixation turning it inward. “Oink, oink!” he snorted. The figure at the end of the station vanished; either he was a passenger or an apparition. Then, magically, a police officer reappeared walking down the steps towards them.

“Johnny, now you’ve done it! Marone! I don’t know you.”

“May I see your I.D. please.”

“Why? Did I do anything wrong?”

“Smoking on a subway platform.”

“I wasn’t smoking.” The officer pointed to the cigarette still smoldering on the tracks.

“Johnny, just give him your friggin’ I.D.,” Ferine pleaded.

The officer wrote down Johnny’s information on the white triplicate sheet of a carbon-copy set and handed him the yellow copy. There was some haiku about this. Johnny thought in triplicates on the subway back to Bensonhurst.”

“It’s a good thing it wasn’t a joint.”   

 By the end of the summer of 1978. Johnny Livewire had been working at the delicatessen counter in the supermarket part-time for six years through high school and college and he was being asked to become a full-timer, a career behind a deli counter? Johnny had to think about it, but the money was good. It was a union job, with fringe benefits.

Shy young daughters escorted their mothers to the delicatessen counter where Johnny worked. Ironically, the supermarket used to be a neighborhood movie theater when Johnny was a kid. In fact, where Johnny was now spooning containers of potato salad and slicing lox was the exact spot where the screen used to be on the stage. “How about that,” Johnny mused as he snitched a slice of bologna. “Life is really a stage, ha-ha, and I’m a performer behind a deli counter.”

On the evening shift, when the manager, Jake Eisenberg, wasn’t there, Johnny Livewire would play WNEW loud on the store radio, sometimes singing along:

“Every time I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face getting clearer
The past is gone
It went by, like dusk to dawn
Isn't that the way
Everybody's got their dues in life to pay”

      In the good old days before closed-circuit television showed everything a worker did on the job, Johnny could entertain himself and supplement his income with free food; rolls and bagels with mayonnaise or cream cheese, a thick bed of prosciutto, hot cappicola, boiled ham, imported provolone with fresh lettuce and tomato from the produce department, virgin olive oil, and a splash of balsamic vinegar. He made heroes for customers and himself. His approved dinners weren’t all; Johnny took ‘leftovers’ for parties in his room at home, too. What snacks the band had in between takes on songs during practices! Johnny’s bedroom, turned into a practice studio to his mother’s chagrin, were the sight of many a deli party, with apple wine and blackberry brandy to wet the whistle, smoking weed up on the roof.

It was easy. Johnny sliced up pounds of Genoa salami, ham. Munster cheese, a few tubs of cold slaw, macaroni salad and what have you, then, he put them in a plastic bag sealing it up good; that way the mice and roaches wouldn’t get to it. He dropped it into a garbage can behind the counter. At the end of the night, he brought the cans outside to the supermarket dumpster and tossed it all in. When the store had closed and all the workers had gone home, Johnny returned to the dumpster to remove the party goods. The other guys in the band provided the beverages.

Sandy came to the counter alone one evening, a maiden voyage from her mom’s kitchen, shopping list in hand, Johnny’s deli counter on her route. Johnny couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Her skin around the halter was the color of caramel candy, like gjetost cheese from Norway, Was she Scandinavian? Her bluish-green eyes, clear and bright, barely visible as she leaned over on her toes, her flat stomach pressed against the cool refrigerated showcase of olives, feta cheese, and smoked kipper herring to say in a sweet proud voice, “A half pound of mortadella and yellow American, please.” 

“Sure, thin sliced or thick?”

“I don’t know. What my mom usually gets, I guess.”

“Okey dokey, thin then,” said Johnny finding it hard to turn his back to her to start the electric slicer and take his eyes off this flesh morsel, dangerously so; he had to concentrate.

“You live nearby, huh?”

“On 43^rd Street.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sandy,” Johnny stopped slicing for a second and turned around. “Sandy, it’s a nice name. Your mom’s a good customer.”

“She said you’re a good deli man.”

“Well thank her for me.” Johnny finished slicing, threw the slices on waxed paper onto the scale on the front showcase but not before handing Sandy a slice for her approval. “It’s a little bit over, okay?”

“Yeah,” said Sandra Amanipour, Johnny found out, her father was Iranian and her mom was Swedish; such a lovely combination. Her smooth tanned skin brought out the radiance of her olive-blue eyes, Caucasian and oriental, bright auburn hair with blonde highlights straight and flowing bangs over her brow like Venetian blinds of Omar Kha’yam ‘s Rubaiyat: 

           O Thou Who didst with pitfall and with gin

Beset the path I was to wander in

Thou wilt not with predestination round

Enmesh me and impute my fall to sin

      Johnny had to get to know her better. Ferine was gone, to Gary and Dickey she was gone, fate sealed by a driver’s education instructor. Any semblance of monogamy could be cast out. It was a freedom that Johnny accepted in lieu of a normal lewdness of Ferine’s constant active imagination, precious varieties of olives, cold cuts, and salads; not one wheel of tasty Pecorino Romano.

      Johnny asked Sandy if she would like to go out with him to see a movie one night.

“Why go to a movie; let’s go to your place.” By then Johnny had moved out of his Mom’s apartment. Sandy would be the first guest in his studio. The next evening, after his late shift, she was waiting outside for him leaning on a parking meter, a gentle summer breeze kicking up the pleats of her peasant dress, sandals kissing her feet on an Arabian night, this 8^th Avenue, Brooklyn, but where was she? Sandy, at a huggable five feet two, bosom relevant to her tiny Norwegian face, pressed to the cloth of sixteen year old sweetness, though no virgin she, oh no. Her eyes answered that she knew what it was that made life fun without laughing aloud.

“I’m pregnant,” Sandy whispered over the deli counter one evening.

“I gotcha,” was Johnny’s first thought. Usually it is the other way around with the woman cornering the father of the child into marriage; not so with Sandy. She was a sixteen year old with her life ahead of her and only silly dreams in place of reality in her mind. She certainly didn’t want to get stuck with a twenty-four year old deli counter person. She must have thought there were bigger things than that in her future. With her looks, she could have gotten any man she wanted.

“My Mom says I should go with you on your trip out west, so we can get to know each other, and visit my cousins in L.A.” Sandy was referring to a change of life Johnny was planning. He had told her how he longed to get away from New York City, try some place new to become a famous rock star, some place like Los Angeles or San Francisco.

Sandy’s mother wisely thought that if her daughter was going to have the baby, she should at least see if she could get along with its father. The week on the road out west would be a good test of their mutual endurance. Just wanting to do the right thing and marry the woman he got pregnant wasn’t enough. Her mother knew her daughter had more going for her.

Johnny knew that, for looks and sex, he couldn’t do any better than Sandy. He had been through this before with another young lady he met at the deli counter. Patricia was tall, blonde, blue-eyed and heavily endowed, but she was also an alcoholic at eighteen, from a broken abusive home. She wanted Johnny to have the baby they created but Johnny wouldn’t go for it; in their case, he felt he could do better. He drove her to the clinic and had the abortion done; she was too weak to fight it, and she knew he was right.

The ride-away car they contracted for had to be delivered to Marina Del Rey within a week. All Johnny had to do was pay for the gas and get it there in the condition he took it. It was a blessing for the car owner who wanted to have his car out west but didn’t feel like driving it out there and was too cheap to ship it; the car owner would rather fly west.

Without a car, but with a drivers’ license and a clean record, this was a good deal for Johnny. Once he was on the west coast and the car was delivered he could stay there if he wished or find his way back to Brooklyn either by contracting for another ride-away car or hoping a train, bus, or plane depending on how much cash he had on hand and how much he was willing to spend.

With Sandy at his side, he had options beyond staying out west. What if Sandy wanted to marry him, have the baby, and stay in Los Angeles? Maybe she’d see a town to her liking along the cross-country and want to put down stakes there. She could even have the baby and move back to Brooklyn with him, or even if she didn’t want to marry him, he could bring her back to Brooklyn and give up the baby. Many options Johnny could imagine and some that were unimaginable. He could give up his dream to become a rock star if Sandy wanted to stay with him and be his bride. They could have a happy family life with child and a steady income from his union job at the delicatessen. Now, all he had to do was enjoy the ride with her. He was already thinking of the blow jobs she would be giving in the driver’s seat before they crossed the Delaware Water Gap, the pull offs in the rest stops where she would saddle him on the rear seat. 

Johnny never imagined she would tell him to stop fucking around with her, to keep his eyes on the God-damned road, and his hands off her twat, but that’s what she did. By the time they reached Lincoln, Nebraska, she was fed up with his lecherous ways. She couldn’t stand the cigarette and marijuana smoke that filled the car like a balloon of gas.

She didn’t mind sleeping with him in the cheap motels along the route; that would keep his groping mitts off her during the day in the car. She couldn’t dare tell him she wanted to sleep in separate rooms at night, even if that thought ran through her mind. Johnny figured she was irritable because she was pregnant and backed off. By the time they finished having lunch without paying the check in the diner behind the outfield of Royals Park in Kansas City, she had made up her mind. When Johnny insisted it would be beautiful to sleep outside under the stars at the park at the base of a noisy dam, she was already missing her Mom’s apartment in Brooklyn. She couldn’t wait to see her                     ns attending U.C.L.A. “Are we there yet?”

“We haven’t even reached Denver, Colorado, girl.”

“How far after that?”

“Another thousand miles; another sixteen hours.”

“What?”

“Why? You don’t know geography?” She didn’t; she was only a freshman in high school, in Tehran, Iran of all places!

“What’s this key for?” she was fumbling through the glove compartment out of boredom. “And this key, and this?’

“Oh, those are for my collection; those are the motel rooms we stayed in.”

“You didn’t return the keys?”

“They’re souvenirs,” One more key, Sandy though, one more night and they’d be in L.A.

Johnny was thinking about what he would do after he visited Sandy’s cousins. He would use the car the three extra days he had in getting cross-country in four days. One thing he wanted to do was visit his friend, the one who introduced him to Dickey, the one who joined the Hare Krishna group in L.A. Then he would drive north to see Mark, another friend who moved to San Francisco to attend law school there.

After driving through Las Vegas, it was just a matter of hours. Sandy was upset that they didn’t stop to play the slot machines in a casino on the strip. They didn’t even get out of the car except to fill-up and piss at a gas station. Still in all, Johnny thought he had a chance. Sandy was pleasant to him even if she was irritable because she was with child.

Into Los Angeles they went. Johnny drove Interstate 10 to the Santa Monica beach. “You haven’t arrived in L.A. until you’re on the beach,” he told her. Sandy called her cousin from a pay phone at a gas station near the beach and got specific directions. Then she went with Johnny who stripped down to his briefs and jumped into the rushing tide water of the Pacific Ocean. Flailing around screaming “Eureka” Sandy sat on a towel on the sand and watched unable to contain her joy, joy that the trip was over.

“Johnny ran back to where Sandy sat. “Come. Come taste the water!”

“What?”

“The water. It’s sweet!”

“What?”
“It’s sweet; don’t you know? The Atlantic is salty and the Pacific is sweet!”

“Get out!”
“No Really!” Sandy didn’t believe it but she let Johnny pull her up and she walked to shoreline to see for herself.

    Johnny stood there, arms across his wet chest, and watched as Sandy cupped her hands, reached down, took some water from the tide, and brought her hands up to her mouth. He laughed hysterically as she spit it out in disgust and stormed back to where he stood keeling over.

Johnny drove to the dormitories of U.C.L.A., found the house number, and went to park.

      “You can drop me off here.”

“Wait, I see a spot up the street.”

“You don’t have to park. I’m going in by myself.”

“What?”

“That’s okay. You said you wanted to see your friends, anyway.”

“You don’t want to go with me?”

“They’re your friends. I’ll see you in two days.”

“Where.”

“Here!”

“When.”

“Three o’clock, Wednesday. Okay?”

“I guess so.” Johnny understood. Sandy gave him a kiss on the lips so as not to tip him off and got out of the car with her bags. Johnny saw as two young men approached and hugged her. They then walked over to the car. One young man reached out his hand the open window. I’m Joseph, Sandy’s cousin. Thank you for driving her here.”

“Sure, my pleasure.”

“I hope you don’t mind our spending some time with her alone.”

“Of course not.”

“We’d invite you in but our room’s a mess.”

“That’s okay; I understand.” That was the end of the conversation. Johnny watched as the three skipped back to the dormitory building and out of sight. He drove off to find his friend in the Krishna Temple.

Two weeks later, Johnny was back slicing ham cappicola and Jarlsberg Swiss in the supermarket delicatessen. He hadn’t been sleeping very well since he returned from California. Sandy’s mom wouldn’t tell him where she was when he stopped by to see her. He’d shared a ride-away with two other young men in L.A. on their way to Stanford, CT to deliver their car; they were happy to pick up an extra driver. He was happy to get a ride home after he couldn’t find his friend in San Francisco and drove back south to meet Sandy and drop the car off in Marina Del Ray. He told his driving companions how Sandy had abandoned him in L.A. They felt badly for him. They dropped him off in Brooklyn.

“Come on out and spend a week; you’ll love it. I’ll ask Laurie to make a place for you on the sofa in the den. It’ll be great!” Johnny’s sister, Claire, had stayed on in Morgantown after she graduated from the University of West Virginia. Her marriage had failed and her estranged husband had moved on to an office lobbyist job in Washington D.C. Claire still hadn’t escaped from the poverty she promised herself she would lose when she moved out of the house at eighteen and married Reeves. Instead, her life made a radical turn.

“She won’t even talk with me!” Johnny moaned into the receiver.

“So long as she had the abortion, forget about her,” his sister comforted.

“Her mom said it wasn’t my baby; she had been with a man in Tehran before she moved to Brooklyn.”

“So there; forget about it. It’s not even yours!”  

Laurie was Claire’s friend from the university whose farm outside of town she would now share. “Imagine that,” Johnny thought. “My sister living off the land on a farm!” What he didn’t know was that Claire had feelings for Laurie. It wasn’t just the lure of fresh vegetables that brought her there. Johnny couldn’t believe his sister had strayed so much from the New York City nights she enjoyed. West Virginia was as west as one could get before hitting the Midwest. It was Donnie and Marie Country from Cincinnati to Denver before one could climb the Rocky Mountain wall passed Aspen. The only two blues pockets that survived in between were Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, Illinois, maybe Austin, Texas if you went further south. Cleveland, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania were cool musically but run down and dangerous. Morgantown was as far west as a late-blooming Jewish American Princess could wander without falling off the earth and breaking her horns.

Johnny Livewire had had enough of New York City. With no band, no woman, and a dead-end job in a supermarket delicatessen, he was ready to get away. San Francisco was his ultimate destination but maybe he could say “Morning Morgantown” before he went on his way; that’s what Joni Mitchell would do. Marina and Sandy could have made him stay in Brooklyn. Now there was nothing. Johnny would check out that car his sister’s friend had for sale. Amtrak at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan to Philadelphia via New Jersey, a lonesome whistle in the beautiful Dutch Country farmland, across the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, around Altoona’s Horseshoe Curve, over the Appalachians, the Highland, and into beautiful Union Station, Pittsburgh. There was Claire in her light blue Volkswagen Beetle; the one Reeve left her in the divorce. 

“You’ll like Laurie; she’s so friendly,” said Claire as they headed south to the West Virginia state line. “The alcohol content is in beer in West Virginia so if you want something stronger, you’d better get it now.” Johnny picked up a six-pack of Yuengling at the truck stop before he was washed up on Rolling Rock.

It was almost dusk when they drove off the Interstate and did a quick go-round of Morgantown. “Here’s the pub I work at,” Claire said as the rode down the hill from the University on Willey Street onto High Street. After stopping in to say “hi” to her colleagues and having a hoagie they drove down the High Street valley passed the one liquor store in town next to the post office. “Damn if the hours on the post office and liquor store are the same!” thought Johnny; and back up the hill on the other side of town they went, where the neon turns to wood.

“I want to introduce you to Jack; he’s the guy I told you about with the car for sale.”

Jack wasn’t home. When they knocked on the bungalow door of a house a troll would be proud to call home. On the porch lay a collection of old metal parts from transportation and machinery, interesting rusty parts that no longer had usage.

“Hello,” Claire said sing-songy through the screen door. “Anyone home?”

“Hello,” echoed a male voice from inside. Then a scruffy beard appeared attached to a mild face with flaccid nose. He silhouette pale to the door became obvious.

“Oh Claire! And what do we have here,” said he tenderly. “You must be Claire’s brother; am I right?”

“You sure are; Johnny it is.”

“Lance I am,” he said and he extended his hand, palm down, as a queen would expect a kiss. Johnny reached under and found his thumb to hook into a handshake; it was the only firmness Lance’s hand seemed to have.

“Jack is out working at a house he found, it was foreclosed, up in the hills.”

“We just wanted to say hello. We’ll be back tomorrow, okay? It’s getting dark.” Claire pointed out.

“Yes; oh, Johnny, you must be tired. We’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll tell Jack you were here.”

The drive to the farm house was down a long unlit two-lane road which, despite its winding shape, was traversed quickly by vehicles with on-coming high-beam headlights clicked off and on, a fast path through old service strip malls foggy with clouds dipping down to get a drink from West Virginia hollers and into thick woods. Claire had to drive carefully. Suddenly the car slowed and turned onto an unseen road hedged in on both sides by tall trees, a road that got bumpier and bumpier with splashing potholes in their natural state for a good twenty minutes with no structures in sight. Then they spied a dim yellow light flickering between the passed trees on a clearance to the left. Laurie had left the porch light on. It wasn’t until morning that Johnny could see the expanse of the farm landscape extending up to a distant hill, the small two story farmhouse within. Laurie was in the kitchen and almost didn’t come out.

“Hello, I hear you; I’m just taking the quiche out of the oven least it burns.” Johnny entered, took off his jacket, and looked around the pre- civil war colonial structure, one that looked hand-made by its first homesteaders.

Lance greeted Johnny and Claire the next morning after a hearty breakfast on the farm made by Laurie: home-brewed coffee, herbal tea, scrambled eggs and quiche from the farm chickens, home fries from the potatoes in their soil, yogurt with enzymes Laurie had been keeping for years starting the whole milk from the cows on the farm beyond the backyard fields, Claire took Johnny out back to choose the vegetables Laurie and herself would use in their dinner plans; tomatoes, lettuce, turnips, and carrots.

“Jack, they’re here,” Lance called over his shoulder into the bungalow. To his visitors he explained that Jack was on the phone with the agent who had contacted him about gutting and refurbishing the foreclosed cottage in the woods. “In fact, we are heading there now; would you like to join us?” As Claire and Johnny were nodding their approval, Jack, a tall slim with well-trimmed beard, plaid red shirt, tightly-fitted over a white athletic undershirt seen peeking through top three unbuttoned, dark blue jeans cuffed two inches deep, tan union-made leather construction books, steel-toed; Johnny had never seen such a well-dressed worker in Brooklyn. He spoke like a mannequin.

“Nice to meet you, Johnny. Claire, you never told us your brother was so strapping. Rethink the long hair, Johnny; it’s unbecoming. Everyone into the jeep. Oh Johnny, there’s the car I was telling your sister about. Johnny followed his pointing finger to see a shiny red Datsun 500 station wagon, couldn’t have been a model from more than a few years before.

“How much do you want for it?”

“How much do you want to pay?”

“One hundred.” Johnny turned to wink at Lance who winced at the price.

“Sold. One hundred,” said Jack surprising them all.

The four loaded into the convertible Jeep four by four and the vehicle hit the slope up the mountain making its own trail. Then it hopped an embankment and headed up a dirt road through the hills of West Virginia. The four talked but could barely hear each other over the ruckus of a straining motor and slipping wheels.

“The cottage,” Jack yelled, “has been abandoned for years. We’re fixing it from scratch. The new owner will love it!” Jack drove shifting gears up and down like he was plowing over wrecks in a demolition derby. Deep in the forest he drove paved side roads passed told Johnny that Jack was taking the hard way up, or was it a short cut. Johnny sang out “New Morning” by Bob Dylan and the others joined in. Next, he sang “Country Roads” by John Denver as the down-home country feeling took over. Indeed, the experiences he had with the failed bands and relationships made him feel like Dylan who was starting over, too, after a motorcycle accident, in need of convalescence, and backing of from the fast lane of life.

They reached the wooden ramshackle house, a house without internal walls, without floors around the winding staircase built to become a loft for the tall narrow structure. It was stripped down to the support beams. Everything was exposed. Jack had plans. Lance had plans. They were going to make a lot of money reselling this baby. Jack was getting rich buying cheaply and selling expensively to city slickers who wanted to get back to nature with Jacuzzis and central heating. “Let’s head over to Green Lake.”

Green Lake wasn’t a lake; it was a fifty foot by one hundred foot pit carved out of limestone, probably twenty feet deep, emerald green from the minerals dissolved in the water. “You can’t swim here but let me show you something.” They followed a rutted path a hundred feet downhill. There it was: Green River. 

Weed was smoked in the forest. Even Claire smoked it. Johnny was amazed. Was this the cheerleader who married a football player and never touched ‘the stuff’ in Brooklyn; the high achiever with the diplomas, a little bit better than everyone else, selling hoagies in a pub out in the county smoking weed, in love with a woman, and hanging out with gay men.? Was this the same person who laughed as Johnny smoked oregano?

At home on the farm his sister rented with Laurie, Johnny could awake to the sounds of solitude, birds singing, and not a rumbling motor within earshot. It was the nature his high school art teacher wanted him to imagine when all he could draw was a red brick wall and fire hydrant. Johnny had time to murder but he was not ready for retirement. Morgantown a detour on his road to fame in the city, He wasn’t ready for a hoedown and rocking chair.

Laurie took a liking to Johnny and wanted him to taste her homemade yogurt. He could try it that night with her in the bedroom and eat all he wished. She liked licking gooey lollipop, too. She had other cultures in mind. Late afternoon, they strolled together through the garden. Claire saw them through her window. “I see you like Laurie, too. Isn’t she wonderful?” Johnny was glad his sister didn’t suggest the three eat their yogurt together. There was one empty hole at the center of the wheel.

It was into Green River in a pool under the waterfalls that Johnny tasted the coolest heat on the slate of Carol’s pinkish heart. Carol was a regular at the pub where Claire worked and she took a liking to Johnny, too. The only attachment Carol had to nature was the deep leaves forming canopies from branches, like jewels of deep fried basil lights flickering on a menorah. Like waxy green candles, her fingers ran through Johnny’s long brown wavy hair trickling in gravity to his torso and its heavy wick below. On a table of gray pot-marked slate pooled up with overnight mountain dew which cushioned her knees as she lowered the underside of her tongue to the source of the flame. With not a soul on the river banks and no sounds but the rustling of foliage blown from the top down labyrinth crashing against the back of the falls, cooling Johnny, sustaining him, then dropping him in a landslide to met her emotional lips entwined in the vines with love.

“What’s that noise?” said Johnny as he disengaged momentarily.

“Oh. It’s nothing but a small animal, maybe a squirrel,” she beamed, and closed her eyes to find his parted lips again in amazement, the suction slipping painlessly on the cold slate to let him inside her, then rolling over, not to be on top but to let Johnny’s back feel the same coolness, lingering him, cooling the melt, as she flexed her insides to harden him again, harmonizing with the water falling, splashing; errant droplets, like chocolate chips laced through warm milk on two tan cookies, their overheated bodies.

“Let’s go back to my bedroom; I want to show you something,” said Carol after they had moved on to the heights.

“After we leave,” whispered Johnny with no intention of leaving. “But I never wanted to leave this place; I love it here. Why can’t we stay?” He laughed. She gave him a playful push which sent him, off balance, tumbling back into the cascading white torrents from overhead. She joined him in a naked cannonball and held on to him when she emerged from the depths. “I almost drowned but you saved me.”

“No Carol; you saved me,” he whispered, and kissed her again in their rescue hold.

Back in Carol’s apartment in town, after a mug of blueberry tea and honey, she led him in. “Come, I have something I think you will like.”

Surprised, he took her hand and went into the bedroom sitting down on the bed. She turned her back for a moment to open a drawer in her bureau and quickly turned back around, with a start, holding in her hands a thick, twelve-inch two-headed, cobalt blue jelly dildo. Johnny was in shock. “What do you want to do with that?”

“Whatever you want to do,” she replied and gracefully started to peel her blouse over her head exposing her chest up to her pink little nipples, covering her face.

“Do we really need to use that?” He was sorry he said it the moment it came out of his mouth. It seems so contradictory after their trip through the Garden of Eden.; she lowered the blouse down to her waist line. He pulled her down with him onto the bed but she was having none of it. She sprung up and sat fixing her hair.

“Oh shit; I forgot I have a dental appointment at five o’clock. Is it okay if I drop you off at the pub? I’ll have no time to bring you out to the farm.”

“That’s alright,” Johnny replied pretending to rise and yawning like he had just been awakened, but he was already up. It was a wake-up call that spontaneity could go so just far before the dirt roads of dreams met the pavement of the reality. Johnny couldn’t stay in Morgantown. He had to return to the future, to San Francisco.