FOR MATURE READERS ONLY
During the 1950's divorce slept as a beleaguered exception, not a fatuous rule of an experimental society, just one more personality forming twist to haul upon a laden back, and as a family process neared fruition, I denied reality of the parental breakup, not understanding what would become painfully obvious many years later; dad was mentally ill.
Passionless jaws of a Cold War had already invaded street-energies of a tarred Brooklyn, biting a gripped nation through dread of nuclear confrontation, while a panicked New York City Board of Education hastily issued ominous labels shown off like grim jewelry, metal 'dog tags' containing names and addresses, dates of birth, schools attended, and the sex of each student, although never actually used as identification for radiated bodies of defenseless children. Apartment building basements equivalently met criteria as Fallout Shelter's, yet no one detected a melting psyche masquerading as such vigorous innocence beneath phenomenon to suppress, a possible annihilation in a nuclear war using some Soviet psychopath catalyst, and maturing, partially naked, minus a father; vivid pictures of an intact family, a basket of memories from those formative years, don't exist. An escapist's modus operandi then became daydreaming, which felt like a comfortable shoe, or a ready vagina.
Maybe almost twenty years on psychiatric medication erased all that was sacred, or could it possibly be a domino effect of an undetected illness, which wasn't even named yet; or perhaps pot smoking, numerous Bamboo inhalations, deleted precious visions, or even worse, it was an unconscious repression of verbal and physical abuse. Was it fate, self-inflicted or just bad luck, an air pollution effect, or maybe some unknown government experiment like the secret tests conducted during World War II, Frankenstein trialing to determine how a human body would react to an atomic attack? The glowing victims, nine of them in upstate New York, and three others in California, Illinois, and Tennessee, were injected with Plutonium. The federal government later on paid $4.8 million for injecting a dozen human guinea pigs with atomic bomb elements, without their knowledge, as a Cold War era radiation experiment. You never know, so it doesn't hurt to be a little paranoid. What I don't remember seems a circle of emptiness; what does remain becomes pulsing fixation, a needed purging of emotions, and a passageway into everlastingness.
Every Wednesday afternoon at precisely two o'clock I jumped on a bus parked outside grade school, headed for an hour of instruction and guidance at Saint-Simon & Jude, and whatever it said in the Bible, whatever reformulated as practice or ceremony, had to be swallowed on an empty stomach, no logical questions allowed inside so many rituals. If anyone ate meat on Friday sin-reducing repent confessed that heinous act to a forgiving priest, but to evade bottomless guilt I could suck on a hot dog after 12 midnight, adore dissenting thought as a mutineer holding a training bra flashing breasts of restless nonconformity.
"Bless me Father for I have sinned, it's been four weeks since my last confession. I had impure thoughts, even though given erogenous zones by the creator, and perhaps he intended for humans to use them. Father, God gave us sweat glands so that we could sweat, and erogenous zones so that we could be erogenous; right Father?"
He replied in a somewhat George Carlinesque manner, "Be a good boy Johnny, say 12,000 Hail Mary's."
An acutely escapist consciousness lacking biography objectives, a sense of self-knowledge, then began an effortless defection from controversial doctrine, developing from a gentle child arising to attend 7 o'clock Sunday mass, as Little League baseball began at nine, to a callous, confused teenager empty of spiritual packaging. Absence of a father-son relationship extended unscheduled misfortune, and it was only a matter of time before capricious attempts to escape a misunderstood environment became activated thru drugs and sturdy pretenses, all the while thinking peers meant freedom, as life became a constant confrontation between intellectual reasoning's and various arts of a compulsive reality.
An explicit, diabolical regret began when Tommy C. willingly introduced us to pot smoking, after relocating to New Jersey, somehow wishing that fateful day could be abolished during justifiable sorcery, purged like dying cancer from bulging resumes of escapism. Tommy's Uncle Clarkie, a relentless body builder and physical specimen until sobering probes of heroin de-sculptured every effort and bead of sweat, deflated from a lawless materiality called dependence, as an intact mind faltered under the statistical death of an ordained junkie. Being a witness to oppressive tragedy held no significance, even though a lifetime of lessons, blight moistened in ferocious, energetic tears, characteristically screamed from a hallowed universe of thoughtless reactions. Drug use continued in grasps of peer recklessness, any apartment building basement sufficing as diligent smoke space for seductive leaves of defeated desire, after chipping in a dollar to buy a nickel bag and corncob pipe.
Naïve drama of smoking a first Jersey joint led to inevitable experimentation through hashish, ingestion of wit diffusion downers, raw-brain accelerations of speed, classic upper imageries, and inexplicable toxic fume inhalations from cleaning fluid. "Hey man, got any Quaaludes?" Dramatic lessons, routinely forgotten, bred necessity for dangerous escapes from trivial life, as adorning skeletal egos through anything like cocaine brought subdued discontent to surfaces of conventional uncertainty via implausible velocity. Occasional tasting of a dualistic drug never created a real problem, but constant obligations for some kind of high, some form of dynamic flight from being, implanted as a setback.
Druggies burdened under a lack of social identity congregated below organotherapy of psychedelic music, self-deceiving biting rock, bland mirrors of slugfest destiny and city stereotypes, at the immune site of an original Electric Circus, edible Greenwich Village, where the Chambers Brothers consumed headstrong stages on stacked heels and theater effects. An audience turned-on to maximum volume movie screens treaded above Bamboo curtain sorrows, as their bodies passed out in temporal demise, poisonous clusters of soft baneberries in cavernous rooms of aberrant silhouettes, electronic flashes, and active dyes. There were so many places to see, and plenty of time to weaken into a mixture of liquidating assets and specie specific repent, as a spitting image of death. Helical journeys of an overly sensitive child, an idealistic young man devoured by misfortune, swallowed as a banquet via attempts at survival in New York City, led to escapist massages, vivid daydreams, secular and sexual retreats, unconscious direct responses simpler than coping with the brutal reality of provocations.
In September of 1966 I embarked on a cerebral cruise to nowhere in particular, as pale autumn leaves mutated into irrelevant crunching sounds beneath unfocused dreams, crystal-clear temptations amid sights and sounds of scholastic spirit, two potential objects of fixation flying in bits and pieces. A not yet 17 year old intuition revealed a very lonely life, absurd like a bearded lady, if it wasn't a constituent of some societal structure, one willing to accept and rescue a sweaty nonconformist from spells of a renowned institution, Brooklyn College. As a protracted freshman year developed into a second term of soul-searching, a cyclonic opportunity eventually arrived when an old Lafayette High School pal offered encouragement, an invitation to pledge a sociogenic fraternity reaping scores of beer-stained chapters.
The uninhibited limited monarchy rented a fetching brick building over a sacred basement, rooms where intellectual limitations died a slow death, and monthly dues seemed reasonably detached from limited economic realities. There, on `Death Row' Flatbush Avenue, a maiden beer was consumed as an obligatory reflex, an awful, lead-glazed Rheingold, at age 17. A willing victim of after-glows raising blood-alcohol levels in grips of a patented, leering limbo, didn't know anyone who wouldn't down self-study drinks, as enormity of environment demanded pathless forces, hideaways overflowing in sounds of redirected intelligence. Under influences of alcohol an important revelation transformed John III into the uninhibited person, as its luster anesthetized inner voices searching for meaning between rock and roll, for passion and ideals within mind altering arrogance of critical escape and barley-blessed peers.
Sensitive-shy when sober, too doubting to just be, not able to luck into a purely sexual relationship, I drank as a precedent, taking hits from well-meaning joints. Too much precious time wasted drinking or smoking pot, feeling like a railroad worm, burrowing, forming tunnels, sometimes appeared as faint depressions or darkened trails under skins of a shaky existence, overwhelming enough reckless energy to abort investment in obtaining a clench of vagina. Fragile potential, all thumbs in a wily decade of immense change where personal and social outlines went awry as interior sea serpents, steadily lost energy. After entering college boasting an 86.8 High School triumph, a relieving graduation ceremony never materialized as an out-of-body experience, but freedom rang as a pink-eyed child flunking out after three aimless, integrated years of 96 meaningless credits.
Contemplating fragile tastes of freedom many year's later, imagining portraits of good friends, there's clear ringing in the ear, a voice of righteous times, yet a heavy tear moistens, the man I should have been. Having access to time machine parts would race mind scars to unforgiving pasts, expunging brain-burning abuse, a forgettable existence, a willing participation in a climatic outbreak of forbidden chemical fruits. As 1968 wore out a diabolical welcome systematic depression wrote extraneous songs, dispirited poetry, into a haphazard diary, not standing a chance of surviving prismatic shadows of war, a plethora of drugs and alcohol.
