Prelude: December 1967

THE DAY AFTER WE LEAVE FOR EUROPE

Tiffy Beall

December 30, 1967

What a happening. I live in a happening, a psychedelic collage of colored lights, electronic music, outrageous distortions of the language, shiny tin-foil pipes, quivering candles, fat and dead balloons, wall posters staring down at me from another world, dirty dishes, knocks at the door, empty matchbooks, funny face drinks, phone calls in the closet, overflowing trash cans, too many bodies on too few mattresses, the rank, tantalizing smell of grass, crooked mirrors, unfinished art work and unfinished plays, guitars, tape recorders, sleeping bags, overfilled closets, clocks that say 2:00 a.m. on week nights, empty butter dish ash trays, invisible nylon thread, D.C. transit busses, dope deals (which never come off), the dark smell of codeine and the people I don’t know.

Then there are the blocks that came from the dump. S,M,I,L,E they spell. Or slime, or miles, or wiles, or emil’s or limes. And a lancer bottle with a peacock feather in it. A window painted on a piece of paper and stapled on the wall, depicting on the other side of the window a world exactly like ours but with no people. The leg of a plaster elf, used as an ash tray. Two 3-foot fence posts from Ellicott City. A 3-foot orange Winnie the Pooh Teddy Bear. Crepe paper streamers of green and purple crossing the ceiling and meeting at the light in the middle. Four psychedelic photos of the Beatles hung on the venetian blinds. A dozen different renditions of our phone number – SONG, SOOG, ROOS, POOH, ROOH, SNOG, etc. written on pieces of notebook paper and taped on walls, doors and other surfaces. A 2-foot square heavy wire mesh cube like cafeterias keep milk cartons in. A dead or dying mistletoe over the door between the living and dining rooms. A square flat plastic container filled with change from Mike’s piggy bank. A full color photo of an atomic bomb explosion hanging on the venetian blind on a bedroom window. A picture from the cover of TIME of the Pentagon Peace March. A yellow and orange map of Georgetown. A Thanksgiving candle, twisty and little. A huge, fat red Christmas candle. A Christmas ornament made from invisible nylon threat, a coke can. Cranberries, popcorn, and cigarette butts, hanging over the door with the mistletoe. A two-foot aluminum telephone cable spool with a pumpkin being raped by four mad onions on top of it. A box, with a cage inside it, with mounds of shredded newspaper inside the cage, with a gerbil named Turd inside the newspaper shreds. A crooked mirror on the bedroom wall by the door. A boy (19) with a beard and a cruel, sensual mouth playing a guitar on a mattress under a poster of James Cagney going to his death in the electric chair. An ashtray made from a broken coconut. A thousand signs: Cream Cheese – 2 for 19₵. Lock Your Car. If You are Careless, You May End up Carless. Please Knock if an Answer is Not Required. Please Ring if an Answer is Required. A Monkey Puppet on a string on a stick. An avocado cookbook. A tiny kitchen with six people in it. A mug of coffee in the refrigerator. A manic depressive, a folksinger, a hepatitic, a virgin, a happy cynic, and a writer.

The day after we leave for Europe, all of it will be gone.

W.J. G.

I guess I'll learn how to fly
For that's the only way that I can get over you
Darling ever since you've been gone
I've been down on the ground

I can buy you out of my life
But it really wasn't worth the price
Because as soon as my tears have gone
Memories of you kept lingering on

I guess I'll learn how to fly
For that's the only way that I can get over you
Darling ever since you've been gone
I've been down on the ground

I keep telling myself you were just no good
And you were not my kind
But obviously I've made a fool of myself
'Cause you're always on my mind

I guess I'll learn how to fly
For that's the only way that I can get over you
Darling ever since you've been gone
I've been down on the ground

(The Fifth Dimension)

Now that I’m in Damascus again, sitting again in my room on my bed with the sound of the Fifth Dimension (not Dylan this time) accompanying my pen, it all seems like a dream. Truman? Dave Drucker? Doug McGlyn, Howie? All strangers. What would I say to them? Yet I lived with them, I ate with them, took buses and went to parties with them. I smoked their dope and they smoked mine. We talked, didn’t we – Howie and I, Truman and I? Didn’t Truman and I share the same pillow and the same laughter? Didn’t Dave cook a tv dinner in our stove? And weren’t all our knees shaky when the cops came to our Christmas party? Didn’t we all drink coffee together in the kitchen and hadn’t all of us at least once shut ourselves up in the closet to answer the phone? But it seems like a dream; it hasn’t any substance. It was a little ripple on the surface of my life, on the surface of all of our lives, I suspect. Somehow none of us let is become any deeper. It was like a continuous party – on the surface of course, but beneath the surface as well. We all made frivolous, amusing conversation, we laughed a lot and listened to music. We talked about books, current events and movies. We talked of ourselves, but only lightly, with detachment and ease. Our apartment was a mood of passionate enthusiasm and total relaxation. People did whatever they wanted, whether it was to ‘be symmetrical’, go into pseudo-magic acts, read aloud from Ambrose Bierce, set fire to orange peels, or write ‘I love you’ in tooth paste on the bathroom mirror. They did it, whatever if may have been, when they wanted, at 2:30 in the afternoon or five in the morning. It was a world where anything could, should and did happen. At our apartment, people could be spontaneous and they were. They could do anything – except possibly go to sleep.

Yet in spite of the carnival atmosphere, I find that there was depth to it too. Because people could be sincere and they were listened to. Those are the people that I won’t forget: Barry and Drew, Jim and Wiljo, Albert and Clint. At the times when it was quiet or you made it quiet by shutting the bedroom door behind you, people could find that the “anything goes” atmosphere applied to important things you had to say about how you felt and what you thought. You were listened to but not condemned. Argued with, maybe, but condemned personally, no. To each was accorded personal respect and concern. It was a good place for people to be able to come. They were amused, entertained, listened to and in turn they amused, entertained and talked. In a way our apartment was literally a world of its own, generating a force of its own that was felt from the moment you entered the door.

It had its bad points (oh Truman!) too of course. There were the nights when you just had to go to bed because you had to go to work to earn the money for the rent and food – and you simply couldn’t get any peace till 2:00 in the morning. There was the incredible (oh Larry oh Kaslow), unspeakable mess you found yourself confronted with every single morning and sometimes twice a day, because when anything goes, there are consequences. There was the nagging paranoia every time there was dope, and there was always dope. There were the strangers, the ones you never saw again and never knew to begin with and knew you wouldn’t like even if you did know them. There were the countless phone calls for other people (“Truman?! No, Truman isn’t here. He doesn’t even live here.”) There was, worse of all, the almost total lack of privacy to think or talk intimately, or neck, or even change your clothes. You never stopped expecting that knock on the door, no, not at one, two or three in the morning. There were always more people. In a way, this was good for me; I learned to be at ease and at home with a great many people. And then there was the worry about food (money). How many people will be here at dinner time? How much bread will they eat? Is there enough milk till tomorrow? Do we need more butter? Are we out of coffee – again? And God help the pantry raided by five people coming down from grass – just after you just spent $15 stocking it that day, too. And they smoked your cigarettes too. No matter how many packs you laid in the night before, mornings were always dry, frustrated, fruitless searches through five empty cigarette packs for just one.

But, oh, it was fun. It was worth it. It was fun waking up each morning not knowing who’d find asleep in the living room. It was fun shocking people by telling them just who your roommates were. It was fun caching the dope, and answering the phone NAASD or NLF Headquarters. It was fun playing 20 questions (“It was Miles Standish! I know it was Miles Standish!”) till 3:00 in the morning. It was fun slipping the lock with laminated cards and wondering whether Joanne would call the cops because we were being too quiet. It was fun living on popcorn and bananas the last few days, it was fun rolling cigarettes, it was fun making lamps from pylons and silk purses from sows’ ears.

Oh, God, it was fun.