Summer of '69 Read online

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  March 1970

  May 1970

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Just east of Worcester, the greenish paisley clouds morph into the faces of Washington, Lincoln, and a couple of their pals.

  Every sound SOUNDS LOUDER: The wind whistling in through Odysseus’s vent windows. The hum of tires on the Mass Pike. The Hammond organ of Procol Harum splashing through the speakers.

  Next to me, Robin draws her knees up under her chin and hugs them. Strands of her long hair vine away in the breeze. Robin is Botticelli’s Venus on a passenger seat, only with dark-brown hair and eyes. She is Juliet to my Romeo, Olive Oyl to my Popeye, Lady to my Tramp, the lady I love.

  Alas, my heart is as heavy as an anvil. Tomorrow she will depart for the Canadian wilderness, vanishing from my life for two full months. Dreading the thought of this summer without her, I reach over, take her slim hand in mine, and squeeze.

  Don’t go north, my love. There’s still time to change your mind. Surely you must feel the same?

  But with businesslike deftness, Robin guides my hand back to Odysseus’s steering wheel and says, “Are you sure you can drive, Lucas?”

  The question does not come unexpectedly out of yonder filigreed blue. An hour ago, back in Cambridge, we were loitering beside a brick wall on which was scrawled “Make Love Not War” and “Bring the Troops Home.” A barefoot, glassy-eyed freak with Jesus hair and beard wandered by. After clocking Odysseus, Robin, and me, he dug into his pocket and produced a wrinkled baggie filled with tiny orange barrel-shaped tabs. He then uttered those most magical of inducements: “Free, man.”

  From the shape and color of the tabs I swiftly deduced that the offering was Orange Sunshine. Fabled West Coast acid, said to rival Owsley as the purest ever produced for mass consumption. Without a second thought, I plucked a barrel out of the baggie and swallowed.

  Now, on the Mass Pike, as we poke along at Odysseus’s maximum velocity of fifty-eight mph, the industrial rhythm of the tires has a symphonic quality. In the cockpit, sonic tides ebb and flow — faint, louder, LOUD, less loud, faint. Out in the distance, the greenish cloud-faces of President Washington & Co. grin down from the heavens. Mount Rushmore, indeed!

  In the meantime, I am tasked with reassuring my ladylove that even in my thoroughly dosed state I am capable of maintaining both altitude and a steady flight path. (I always meant to teach her to drive a stick, but like so many of my intentions, it was left unrealized.) “Have no fear, my daffodil, I am in complete control of the sit —” This would be the very moment a humongous eighteen-wheeler barrels past, intent on blowing us off the road. With a panicked gasp, Robin grabs my thigh and squeezes while I wrestle my boxy German tin can back into the lane.

  The back of the 18-wheeler,

  An elephant’s square gray rump,

  Leaves us in

  The New England dust.

  Tock, tick. Robin hasn’t uttered a word in . . . five minutes? Ten? As Captain Lucas attempts to navigate his flimsy vessel homeward, stewed synapses sputter inside his skull, then spark with tiny twinkles of light. He imagines that if he’d taken the time to have a second thought back in Cambridge before dropping the Orange Sunshine, it might’ve gone something like this: It’s going to be a long enough drive home to Long Island without dramatically increasing the risk of taking an imaginary exit into the vast unknown.

  Or into a ditch.

  How long will the drive be? Hard to say. Acid time is spongy — not that Captain Lucas is complaining. The irreversibly toxic tick-tock from present to future is the enemy. In less than twenty-four hours, the love of his life decamps for the frozen tundra.

  Odysseus oozes to a standstill. The thing that from a distance resembled a garden trellis stretching across the highway and draped with green vines and shimmering pink flowers is in reality a row of tollbooths.

  Ah! Sweet relief! The trippy nervousness that usually accompanies any interaction with a Straight Person of Authority mellows when the toll collector appears to be not much older than me. Bushy sideburns. Dirty-blond hair creeping out from under his cap and down over the collar of his green uniform. Face made of pink doll plastic.

  Our eyes meet, and the toll guy grins knowingly — as only someone intimately acquainted with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds would. “Outta sight, man. Wish I could be where you are right now.”

  “Wish you could, too.” I offer him a handful of viscous coinage that has puddled together in my palm like lumpy silver mercury.

  My plastic-faced comrade chuckles and plucks out what’s owed. “Peace, brother.”

  “Hang loose, man.”

  And away we —

  “For God’s sake, Lucas! What if he was a cop?” Robin wigs out. Taken by surprise, I unintentionally wrench the wheel, making the microbus swerve violently. Tires screech as Odysseus rocks like a boat tossed on stormy seas.

  I’ve just regained control of my trusty rusty ship when a voice from behind us mumbles, “Huh? Cop?” It’s Milton. I’ve forgotten that he’s sleeping on the mattress in the back. On our way home from a brief but torturous visit to Maine, we stopped in Cambridge to pick him up.

  “It’s nothing, man. Go back to sleep,” I tell him. Meanwhile, Robin’s twisted around in her seat, hands locked into fists, peering out the back window as if expecting the entire Massachusetts Turnpike Tollbooth Cavalry to be thundering up behind us. In the past, my ladylove has, on occasion, been known to err on the acute side of uptight, but given my currently blitzed sensibilities, am I truly in a position to cast judgment?

  “A tollbooth collector cop?” I whisper so as not to alarm Milton. “Is that really possible?”

  “What do you think, Lucas?” Robin answers harshly. She swivels to face forward but angles the rearview mirror so she can continue to scrutinize the traffic behind us.

  What do I think? I think butterflies were originally called flutterbys until someone with dyslexia got involved. But what if she’s right? Said toll collector’s skin did look plastic. Is he, at this very moment, issuing an all-points bulletin? Attention, units! Be on lookout for suspected dope fiend. Glassy-eyed. Straight brown hair past shoulders. Last seen headed west on Mass Pike in brightly painted psychedelic microbus!

  We’d be hard to miss.

  Arms crossed tightly, Robin peers into the rearview mirror for a convoy of flashing cherry tops. This is bad. What if I’ve done something that will jeopardize her future? Idiot. Idiot. IDIOT! Unlike me, her life has direction, purpose, a goal. She starts at Middlebury in the fall, plans to major in environmental studies and international relations. I’ve never heard of either, but they sound importa
nt.

  If you look at your surroundings,

  Is that environmental studies?

  If you have cousins in France,

  Are they international relations?

  “See anything?” I ask.

  No answer. My queen is royally ticked.

  Moron. Moron. MORON! You only have a few hours left with her, and look what you’ve done. What if she’s right and we get pulled over? What if they ask me to walk in a straight line? Even worse, what if they ask me to think in a straight line?

  Time to engage in emergency fence mending: “I . . . I love you so much. And I know I’m not always right about things, but . . . he really didn’t strike me as a cop, babe.”

  Robin’s eyes leave the rearview mirror. Her face softens. She sighs with exasperation. “Oh, Lucas, like you could really tell anything right now.”

  Out in the distance, the famous presidents have given way to pulsating purplish jellyfish clouds with long gray and blue tendrils. So far, no sirens have wailed, nor lights flashed, in pursuit of Captain Lucas and crew. No plastic-faced tollbooth narcotroopers have parachuted out of Lockheed C-130s overhead. In the back, Milton’s snores sound like a turboprop struggling to gain altitude. When they picked him up back in Cambridge, he said he’d been awake for the past thirty-six hours writing a paper on the impact of microprocessor chipsets on the future of space travel. (Say what?) In the seat beside Captain Lucas, Robin tilts her head back and gazes upward, where, next to the dome light, is taped an R. Crumb cartoon of Mr. Natural saying, “The whole universe is completely insane.”

  “Lucas, can I ask you a question?” she asks.

  Uh-oh, sounds like trouble. “I’m an open book.”

  “A stranger comes out of nowhere and offers you LSD and you just take it?”

  “You saw that freak. He was cool.”

  “How did you know it was really LSD?”

  How does Lucas the Impulsive know that the acid he took an hour ago was acid? Could it have something to do with the hundreds of tiny silverfish currently wriggling around inside Odysseus’s one-eighth-inch-thick windshield?

  And yet Robin’s concern, though unlikely, is not without merit. Creative chemists the world over have been known to lace their product with a little something “extra” to boost the rush. Feeling motormouthy and having two thousand thoughts per second? Your acid, mon ami, is mixed with speed. Muscles tight and yearning to stretch? A pinch of strychnine has been added. (Know what’s truly freaky? Strychnine is rat poison. But it’s like the cyanide in apple seeds. In microscopic amounts, it won’t hurt you.)

  But Professor Lucas digresses. Back to Robin’s inquiry. “You mean, you think someone would go to all the trouble of making little orange barrels that looked exactly like Orange Sunshine, but weren’t? Why would anyone do that?”

  “I don’t know, Lucas. I’m just saying, is this what you’re going to be like next year if you get into Goddard?”

  It’s not immediately clear how they went from the authenticity of the Orange Sunshine to his expected enrollment at Goddard College, but El Capitán finds it reassuring that Robin’s thinking about their future. He reaches over and strokes her shoulder. “Listen, everything’s groovy. I promise I’ll be cool with the next toll collector. I’ll get us back to Long Island in one piece. I’ll do whatever I need to do next year.”

  Is it his bugging imagination or does the smile Robin returns appear a bit brittle? She gazes out the passenger window. Odysseus sails onward, toward Long I Land.

  How could it be

  That someone so smart and pretty

  Could be into me?

  At age thirteen, Lucas is a medium-size, slightly chubby, Dumbo-eared, poorly coordinated, and somewhat befuddled young suburban individual. The father expects progeny who will become prosperous businessmen tennis players. The mother asks merely for academic brilliance. It appears that Lucas is destined to achieve neither. At school, he is adequate at best. The popular kids ignore him while they communicate in their secret indecipherable language. Baffled, he adapts by becoming invisible, creeping around corners, blending into the background.

  But then begins the Semi-Miraculous Transformation. In the span of eighteen months, he grows eight inches. His shoulders broaden, voice deepens, waist narrows, cheekbones appear. He passes an afternoon in the hospital having the auris elephantus pinned back. It is now freshman year of high school, and girls who never knew he existed do double takes. Guys who’d never let him play punchball with them at recess suddenly have an open seat at their lunch table.

  This transformation is as mystifying to the transformed as it is to everyone else. Inside Lucas, nothing has changed. He is still muddled and befuddled. Still lacking the athletic and intellectual makeup the progenitors had hoped for. But they have bestowed upon him a genetic blessing, a letter of transit through the tempestuous ninth-grade social scene — a chassis that gives Lucas a facade of poise.

  Robin, on the other hand, is hatched of the choicest Grade A, 100 percent excellent hereditary material. As far back as kindergarten, she has been universally liked and admired, and not in that unapproachable, cliquey, I’m-not-sharing-my-blocks-with-you kind of way. Someday people will say she has an aura — strong and determined while soft and caring.

  In elementary and junior high schools, she and her friends are the serious, studious ones. Together they are tracked into smart-kid classes. They dominate such extracurricular activities as yearbook, literary magazine, student government, and model railroad club.

  Robin will scrape elbow and knee in field hockey and volleyball. She will also become very pretty. (Who ever said life was fair?)

  Spring ahead to a warm and sunny 1968 senior-year October day. Robin sits under a tree studded with red and gold leaves in the courtyard, reading The Stranger. Lucas passes on his way to chemistry class. On impulse, he abruptly doubles back. After all, they are seniors now. Grown up, mature, risen above (or so they pretend) childish concerns about popularity — equals soon to be dispersed to institutions of higher learning hither and yon. It has been not quite a year and a half since the hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love, sixteen months since Jimi doused his guitar with lighter fluid and set it ablaze and Janis’s plaintive wails first gave people shivers at Monterey. Freaks in bell-bottoms and hippie beads have begun to sprout like weeds among the well-trimmed populace. Lucas is a weed with a chassis.

  Until this moment, he has never said more than three words to Robin. His heart thumps nervously, the imprinted low social expectations from his awkward Dumbo-eared formative years leading him to prepare to be shooed away (but because she is Robin, he can at least hope for a gentle shooing). He nods at the book in her hands. “What do you think?”

  (If nothing else, he has now succeeded in saying a total of seven words to her.)

  The sun shines down from over his shoulder. Robin squints up in the brightness and says that she prefers to see meaning and purpose in life. “And you?” she asks.

  Him? Having spoken on impulse and thus failed to arm himself with a reply to her reply, he mumbles something about meandering through meaninglessness and leaning toward existentialism.

  Then hastily adds that he is open to other interpretations.

  And thus he is invited to join her on the grass. They sit side by side, chatting and watching the squirrels busy themselves with acorns. Meanwhile, somewhere within the brick walls surrounding the courtyard, a chemistry class begins and ends. Lucas and Robin are still sitting on the lawn when the next period bell rings. Robin gathers her books, saying she must get to gym. They stand. For the first time since Lucas joined her, their eyes meet without the sun in hers. She blinks, and recognition creeps onto her face: “You’re Lucas Baker.”

  He bows. “At your service, madame.”

  She smiles. “Call me tonight?”

  He does.

  Amber sunlight slants through Odysseus’s windows. It’s late afternoon on Long Island and I’ve descended from the pe
ak acid plateau to that mutable base camp where one can act straight if circumstances (i.e., encounters with parents) demand it. After we drop Milton at his house, it’s a short hop to Robin’s. In her driveway, she quickly gathers her things. Her adieu is hasty, her desire for a long, hot shower paramount. She says that she’ll be busy this evening packing for Camp Juliette in Ontario, so I will not see her again until the dreaded morn, when we will say our final farewells for the summer. In the setting sunlight, she has to squirm out of my arms. Otherwise I might try to hold on to her until the dawn.

  A little while later, I’m sitting on the mattress on the floor of my room, surrounded by scattered clothes, records, Ski magazines, and books. The walls are plastered with posters of Dylan and Hendrix, and Brando from The Wild One. My heroes: rebels one and all. But I am feeling far from heroic. Sadness throbs like an open wound.

  Earlier this spring, when Robin first told me she was going to be a counselor for the summer, I beseeched her to reconsider. That was back in March, when we were greenhorns in the divine realm of love. The prospect of months apart felt — continues to feel — unbearable. But Robin had attended Camp Juliette for half a dozen years as a camper and had always planned to cap her experience in a counselor role. If what we had together was real, she said, it would still be there when she returned.

  (I didn’t tell her how badly those words shook me. It never occurred to me that what we had might not be real.)

  Our trip to Maine was meant to be a few last precious and uninterrupted moments together; instead it was a bummer of epic proportions. Beyond the quasi-liberal boundaries of the New York suburbs, people openly stared at us. NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE signs — and the anti-counterculture sentiment they signified — were ubiquitous. At a clam bar in Bar Harbor, a white-haired old salt wearing red suspenders and a plaid shirt grumbled loudly about us “long-haired degenerates.” At the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, a kid excitedly pointed and blurted, “Look, Mom, hippies!” as if we were some rarely glimpsed breed of exotic biped. When strangers flashed the peace sign, it was usually in a taunting manner.