In the summer of 1963 ,when I was eight, I visited my grandfather in Arkansas and when we were on the front porch of his house I asked him if he could beat up Nikita Kruschev.  Kruschev had been on TV pounding a lectern with his shoe saying the U.S.S.R. would bury the United States. He seemed like a school bully and I wondered if granddaddy could protect me. I don’t remember what he said but it made me feel like everything was going to be okay.

Did you ever have a dream where you’re walking around in a strange city trying to find your way out? Someone gives you directions but they don’t make sense and everything keeps changing randomly so you have no landmarks to guide you. The sun is going down and people and places seem meaner and harder. You feel empty and afraid then you wake up.

I began to feel that way my junior year in high school. That summer on the front porch with my grandfather seemed so far away in 1970. Positive feelings and optimism had been replaced by uncertainty and a growing undefined guilt at being an American. Instead of unity, divisiveness was growing throughout the country.

I was almost nine when J.F.K. was assassinated but life in our small town continued unaffected. Then hoses and dogs were turned on people in Selma but I believed that good people would prevail. In April 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated then two months later Robert Kennedy was killed. My age of innocence was gone and I was no longer sure good would prevail. 

G.I. ‘s in fire fights with Viet Cong began appearing every night on the news and local boys were dying in Viet Nam. Anti-war demonstrations were breaking out on college campuses and draft cards were burned. In August, 1968 at the Democratic National Convention television coverage switched between the nomination of Hubert Humphrey and police outside battling with long haired protestors. 

I went on with my daily life with a growing sense that things were changing rapidly. Jim Morrison of the Doors in late ’66 said “I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.” In my dreams two plus two began to equal five and the fear began that nothing made any sense.

In early 1969 news of the My Lai massacre in VietNam began coming out. Charlie Company of the 11th Infantry Brigade had possibly killed as many as several hundred people in the village of My Lai and it was in the news for weeks. Soldiers were now baby killers and spat on by long haired hippie types in airports. The Company leader William Calley was convicted of murder and in an odd way i felt guilt just being an American.

By 1970 drugs came to our small town. I tried mariquana which just made me paranoid and smelled like burning rope. Alcohol was my preferred drug and I drank a lot that junior year. Mainly because of peer pressure but also to help me socialize. I heard through the grapevine others were making psychedelics out of a certain mushroom and were taking heroin and L.S.D. One slightly older guy committed suicide that year.

Social norms were really changing. The Rolling Stones had released “Let’s spend the night together” in 1967 and much of the music we listened to was heavily sexualized. For many guys a date with a girl was a conquest as we were urged to “Go all the way” as sung by the Raspberries in 1972. It made for a toxic mixture of lust, guilt and anxiety.

The Doors with front man Jim Morrison released the song “Break on through” in 1967. The group took its name from “The Doors of Perception” written by Aldous Huxley who had a positive experience using mescaline and thought it could expand the way we used our minds. Psychedelic drugs became the vehicle of rock groups to reach altered states of excitement, enlightenment and heightened eroticism. This quickly spread to teenagers looking for sex, thrills and maybe even God.

Also in 1970 there was a growing nihilism among me and some of my friends. Vietnam was still hot and there was always that fear we might wind up there. The music was dark and sometimes demonic with occult symbols and messages. “Stairway to heaven” sounded otherworldly and dangerous while the Rolling Stones song “Paint it Black” was depressing.  

I see the girls walk by 

Dressed in their summer clothes

I have to turn my head

Until my darkness goes.

The music itself had a dark feel. Other songs like “Run through the Jungle” and “Let’s live for today” made me think about dying in Vietnam but finding some pretty girl tonight to get drunk with and find comfort. I had no chance of going to Vietnam because of partial deafness but still I soaked up the feelings of my friends and made them mine.

That year Jimi Hendrix ,on September 18th 1970, suffocated on his vomit from a drug overdose then October 4th Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose. On July 3rd, 1971 Jim Morrison died of a heart attack. He had broken through to the other side but what was over there? They were all just 27. It didn’t make any sense.

My senior year was like the dream where i’m wandering around a strange city trying to find my way out but to where? My friends were just as lost and didn’t know it. They said things like party hearty and do your own thing….whatever that means. I felt overwhelmed and any real wisdom seemed to go right over my numb brain. A girl that year said she was a member of the church of what’s happening now and I felt like I was sitting on the front pew.

By the time I left for college in September, 1972 I was a ship lost at sea. I didn’t know what was right or wrong or even if there was such a thing. Forget about knowing how to decide. For all I knew we just made up everything as we went along on this meaningless cosmic ride. I was a long way from that summer with my grandfather and the feeling that everything was going to be okay.

The college in the middle of Georgia had around three thousand on campus students. Once called the Harvard of the South it had old two and three story brick buildings clothed in ivy as well as light stone and brick buildings built in the last few decades. Large oak and hickory trees graced the gently sloping campus that could be walked across in fifteen minutes. 

Walking around campus with my parents we passed other wide eyed students also with their parents. The nervousness clung to me as I tried processing being on my own for the first time in my life. After they left I felt strangely detached as I sat in my dorm room wondering what was next? Then I met my roommate.

Smoking a corn cob pipe he liked the simple things in life and his long, wavy hair was never out of place. He played guitar and harmonica like Bob Dylan, sometimes playing his music. Guys started hanging out in our room smoking weed, acting like they shared some private joke and being condescending when I tried to make conversation. Then one night they lit a ring of lighter fluid around my bed as I slept. I avoided them after that.

The first few weeks were a rush of new experiences as I began classes and met people. One of the most interesting persons was my English teacher who took the time to try and know me. She wore long cotton dresses and her hair was long and brown. Wire rim glasses made her look the writer as well as her gentle, sensitive manner. She thought I had potential and was possibly a kindred spirit…. an INFP like I later discovered I was.

She asked open ended questions about things we read which sparked a lot of free flowing discussions. The subjects were sometimes funny like when we were asked to describe taking a bath in jello and mind scrambling the time she asked when was two plus two equal to five. Carlos Castenada’s experiences taking peyote made me wonder why anybody would do that and what did they gain?

Reality was being examined through reason, drugs, social norms and the senses. In the case of drugs my default reaction was look what it did for Jim Morrison. With reason it was more nuanced and interacted with social norms. Two plus two equals five can be synonymous with an authoritarian country that controls what people know with the byproduct intense peer pressure which begs the question…. “does belief in a consensus reality make the lie true?”

Two plus two equals five had been in my dreams about five years before and had a very personal meaning. How could you know if anything was true if all methods for finding truth are valid making all answers true? How can I really know what I know? I was probably one of the few people that felt like that. Most thought it was a fun, easy class and a few saw that it was designed to create writers. Back then I couldn’t put into words what I was thinking or searching for but I do remember feeling anxious most of the time.

Art class was simply learning how to draw and I enjoyed it. A nice girl named Margaret sat next to me and we started having lunch together. I think she sensed my troubles interacting with people and was trying to help me. Having lunch with her gave me a bubble of security and I could talk to her. She invited me to Baptist Student Union activities but I resisted.

Due to my bad grades but potential I was placed in the Alternate Freshman Program. It emphasized informal learning and developing a small community. We met with our professor and two older students in their homes which turned out to be part self esteem rehab (we listened to excerpts from the Velveteen Rabbit) and social enlightenment which sounded to me a lot like their own opinions. 

The group was a mix of high academic achievers, underachievers like myself, dreamy artistic types and a few very average people. Some were lost like me and struggled with social situations and at least one was manic depressive. One really smart guy seemed to understand situations and people better and became friends with me. Intuitively I didn’t feel the professor was doing anything to prove her ideas right. 

Meanwhile my roommate was disappearing with friends for days at a time. They mentioned one time hitchhiking to a concert and buying drugs. Janis Joplin a little over a year before took some untested, lethal heroin and her heart exploded a few seconds later and she smashed down on the carpet. My roommate and his friends were somehow enlightened and knew what they were doing just like Janis. 

Margaret was a real Godsend during this time. She was a Christian and had a loving quality and a calmness. So many seemed to be selling ideas and attitudes and only accepted me if I agreed with them. With her it was different. There was a light around her as I began opening up and she sometimes shared her faith. With her I could disagree and she still liked me. 

White witch, a rock band, played on campus that Fall and I felt darkness and danger yet others watched with no awareness. My sister and I had seances using a ouija board and soon quit but a silent presence remained making my bedroom suddenly cold in the summer and appearing as an apparition blocking the door. When I was in the 11th grade the presence smothered me with a pillow until I thought I was going to die. Even that Fall the presence seemed to be following me.

I’m a highly sensitive person that has what is called sensory processing sensitivity. About the third or fourth week of school I was starting to feel overwhelmed by everything. I couldn’t selectively filter sensations so everything seemed to be coming all at once. It made it hard to concentrate as different sensations pulled at me and my attention was like an old black and white TV fading back and forth between channels.

It got to where I didn’t want to go to classes with all the people talking and moving around. Not only were my senses overloaded, I also felt very anxious. The cafeteria was really difficult. One dreary, cold day I was about to finish eating when the song “I am a rock” by Simon and Garfunkel began. 

A winter’s day 

In a deep and dark December

I am alone

I picked up my tray and began walking toward the door past noisy, crowded tables.

I’ve built walls

A fortress deep and mighty

That none may penetrate

I have no need of friendships friendship causes pains

The sound was swirling around me as I dropped off my tray and headed to the exit.

I have my books

And my poetry to protect me

I am shielded in my armor

Hiding in my room safe within my womb

I touch no one and no one touches me

I am a rock I am an island

I walked up the small hill past a skeletal tree to my empty room.

 

My roommate was gone now for weeks at a time and I really enjoyed the privacy. I drew my high top tennis shoes from different angles in pencil as well as my hands, even my transistor radio that looked like a gas pump. Also for art class I created a mobile of geometrical designs and painted it.

In English class we were reading classics like the “Rump Wiper”, a man on a quest to find the ideal replacement for toilet paper and also writing a paper to describe the edge of a magnified razor. I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, the teacher was really good and was just trying to get us to think in different ways so we could be better writers.

I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X in AFP but at seventeen how much can you really know about life. I definitely couldn’t think critically so I was relying on the opinions of people a year older and the professor. AFP had this feeling of trying to shape me in a way I didn’t know or understand and not teaching me how to think and giving the resources so I could learn to make intelligent decisions.

 Meanwhile through Margaret I met other Christians and eventually went with her to the Baptist Student Union one night. We sang songs and listened to a message and it was really nice. I felt comfortable around them and began to open up some. It was a little bit of light shining in my world.

The Christians were different. Some of them carried Bibles everywhere, wore khaki and button down shirts and penny loafers. The word brother was used even though I didn’t feel that close and sometimes they wanted to pray with you. Yes it was different and sometimes awkward and some might say nerdy. But they weren’t mad at their father and experimenting with dangerous drugs. There was a calm about them and they were nice.

I went home at Thanksgiving and my mind worked overtime trying to process everything. Going back was hard, especially when I said goodbye to my parents. My roommate was gone but the weather was dismal as I trudged past turned down faces and heard occasional laughter on my way to class. Then I would go with Margaret or by myself to the cafeteria then back to my room for the rest of the day.

Several weeks went by in a blur then one day I got into a cab with my suitcase. The sky was gray and trees naked riding past somber old houses to the bus station. I lit a cigarette as the bus pulled out and stared out as everything rushed by. Then we were out on the Interstate and trees and open fields.  At noon we stopped at a truck stop restaurant. The fields were turned up clay as tractors went down long lines of churned up red ground. Then we were on the road again.

 

Been walking my mind to an easy time

My back turned towards the sun

Lord knows, when the cold wind blows

It’ll turn your head around

James Taylor, Fire and Rain

 

I thought of this song as I stared out at the flat land. The last few months had been cold and hard with lots of new ideas and experiences. Some had literally turned my head around, more like scrambling my mind, and leaving me with more uncertainties. Sometimes my brain felt like a garbage can that all this stuff had been dumped into and I was still trying to sort it all out.

But there had been some light and illumination and a glimpse of something that was better and made sense. I thought about Margaret and her Christian friends and the peace they had and I envied them. I lit another cigarette and stared out at the afternoon light slanting golden red across the fields. 

The bus entered a small town and took several turns going down brick streets past a rusty tin warehouse, small frame houses and empty lots then turned right maneuvering in front of a high school marching band and behind a float with people throwing out candy. Smiling, laughing folks, young and old, stood on both sides of the street in front of barber shops, insurance offices and small cafes. The band was playing “Santa Claus is coming to town.”

We opened the bus windows and soon were sticking our arms out waving at the smiling crowds. A few people in the back started singing spontaneously along with the band. Everyone on the bus was smiling and laughing and suddenly talking with people that were strangers just minutes ago. Even the sunlight shining between and on the red brick buildings seemed more golden.

Maybe there was a lot of good in Americans in spite of all the criticism and there were a lot of things that didn’t need to be changed. Some traditions and beliefs were good and they helped us to be better humans. Maybe some things were absolute and needed to be held onto and maybe there was a God. Maybe logic and reason and belief could go hand in hand and everything be okay like it was on the front porch with my grandaddy.