Chapter Four The Seeds...you're pushin' too hard.....pushin' on me....Sky Saxon sang.....\par Dutchess proved to be possessive of everything around her. The queen sun, center of the universe, holding fast with gravitational force, the planets who nourish themselves from her hydrogenic explosions. Her "posessions" included Mike, as he was now calling himself, and as he prefered now to be called, over the more present tense Dutchess posessive "Mikey" which to him was akin to the difference between calling Ukraine, THE! Ukraine, a Soviet satellite, a land grab geographical possesion. At times, Dutchess was the Soviet Union, and Mike, naught but HER Ukraine. Eventually she would adopt the more familiar, "Michael" when talking with, about or to him. A show of maturity, although he was far from that at this stage of the game.
Ukraine or not, he did get to enjoy the sweet fruits of her plentiful bounty, home, heart and hearth. Although he was quite attached and fond of her, he had become increasingly more and more independent since his days in the islands. He would disappear for a couple days at a time, either with Tommie and the others in the pack, or shack up with another girl for a couple of days, to enjoy her fruits, and then return to Dutchess, no questions asked. The acid flowed like water over a psychedelic dam and brain cells swam upstream to spawn, Coho in the Columbia. He had embarked on an altered states road trip in 1963, and for the next 10 years would increasingly press the pedal to the metal on a hallucinagentic highway fueled by acid, mescaline, peyote, hashish, grass, and opium. Living in the city had turned him into a real pharm boy. He would mix, match and unmatch pharmaceuticals in death defying Rubic Havana cubist combinations, flying with gregarious ease from a psychedelic trapeze
In addition to the internal changes in Mikes psyche, were the sociopathic changes going on in America itself, or herself. The country was in turmoil, fucking itself, a crazed hermaphrodite. Civil rights were becoming a most un-civil issue with 'We Shall Overcome" getting hosed down in the deep south streets of inbred 'Bama and "ole Miss" trying to keep a tight lid on it's "nigras". "Look-see what we found heah, why it's them three freedom lovin' ridin' kids we jes' found in an earthen dam, three kids, two of 'em jews I think, college edicated now eradicated, from the no-oth, come down to right our wrongs, but, ha! shit, they done forgot the geography and the generations of hatred and mistrust we got of them damn yankees and the coloreds. Hell, did you heah, a housewife from Detroit riding on backroads in the backwards south with a "colored" feller, got hersef' shot and left in her station wagon. Commies comin' down heah like a that, damn un-American, I tell ya, damned un-American is what it is."
It would all culminate in 1968, when Martin Luther King, high on the list of enemies of the state, according to Lady Jane Edgar Hoover, was on a private Bataan death march towards getting mowed down in a motel in Tennessee with the Memphis blues again. The Free Speech movement had already been underway vociferously vocalized by a free speech savior, Savio, by name, who lead the charge. Kerouac was in retreat, Ginsberg was getting giddier by the day, and Vietnam was starting to heat up and soon the political pot would explode sending shrapnel in all directions, as though a fragmentation grenade had been gingerly tossed into a jungle village schoolhouse by a young soldier who caught the clap in Saigon. The whore was found dead the next day behind her bamboo curtain. It was the election of Richard Nixon that brought Mike back to grounded reality, for it was this event that made him realize that the public had to have their wits about them. The ship of state had been highjacked on the high seas by a ship of fools who were now in charge. In 1972, he curtailed most of his psychedelic drug taking, although smoking marijuana illegally continued until 2008 when he qualified for legalized medical marijuana. Yes, he could see better, but it wasn't as fun with no laws to break.
Since his "land ho" return stateside, Mike had negotiated a peace of sorts, a cease fire truce if nothing else with his parents. More of a Panmunjon uneasy peace as opposed to a Versailles Treaty or the one negotiated by the gents at Ghent. It took awhile, but in time, his parents had come to terms with the pilgrims progress of their kid and step kid, respectively, the independent prodigal. Besides, his birth dad was named Sam, and his mom was Rosemary, so what do you do with a kid who is merely ahead of his celluloid time, who is at once and the same, the son of Sam and Rosemary's baby? Things between them were a lot calmer now, so calling them (collect) wasn't a challenge to be dreaded anymore. Some of Mike's old friends asked about him and his parents kept them up to date on his whereabouts, but had no idea what he was up to on the streets, nor did they want to speculate. Would have killed them on the spot. He asked about his old friends, still in school, and felt light years away in another universe altogether, far from the sock hops and prom queens and under the bleacher dreams...living on the Strip was one big night under the bleachers anyway.
When a runaway ends up in Hollywood, it doesn't take long for the termites to start attacking the wood. Young girls and boys would be "befriended" and taken care of with a roof, food and plenty of booze and drugs, then before you can drop your drawers you're on the street whoring for drug money or to make a pimp rich, while he kept you pumped with narcotics, your reason for living, now to get high, having sex to earn your high, and the beatings, and the beat go on, and on, on, on.....Mike had matured enough during his atomic hula days in the Pacific, to a point where ground radar could intercept the Messerschmidts before they crossed the Channel and rackish R.A.F. pilots could down them before Dover.
One day while walking along the Strip, which is pretty much what you did there looking for an angle or a hustle, Mike saw a young girl with bewilderment emminating from her eyes, careful steps, walking, carrying a small suitcase, new in town, fresh off a bus from somewhere back in the Midwest. It's not detective work, most of the kids were from back east going out west right on the coast where the California boys and girls are really the most as the song proclaimed. She was a new born baby, one day old on the streets, probably just hours covered in the afterbirth of innocence that all runaways are drenched in, until the vultures moved in. She was beautiful, a vision, and still invisible, but would soon begin to take shape, form and substance and would be swooped down upon. She was also angelic in appearance and innocent beyond belief. Mike was mesmerized by this mermaidian apparition, not a sea mammal at all, and all he wanted to do was to get her off the streets before nightfall. She was a gentle piece of porcelain to be cared for as you would ancient treasures, jewelled goblets found in the Gobi. He crossed the street to intercept her and to meet her. His hormones made him tumble down the rabbit hole, made as a hatter at first sight, and basically, he had a weak spot for the underdog and she was a sitting duck waiting to get plucked.
There was something about him, that didn't frighten her when he approached her on the sidewalk. She felt inside, she later explained to Dutchess when Mike had left for San Francisco, "It was as though he had always been there. I can't explain it, but it was a comfortable feeling, a safe feeling, and had to laugh because his hair was long, and shaggy like a dog, his jeans were frayed at the cuffs and his knees were poking through the denim." She and Dutchess both laughed, as he tended to wear clothes until they evaporated off his flesh. He didn't care about clothes and in fact the life of a nudist would have appealed to him as most times in the apartment he walked around without a care and without a stitch, no matter who was over and how high he was. (In 1969 he claimed to be a nudist bhuddist with a yen for zen and would meditate, and not masturbate.
Most of the Strips population at night was fags, johns, teenyboppers, and frat brats. Beer and grass and a an occasional piece of ass is all that mattered. The acid academy was small, an elite corps of advance troops for what was to come in the Sixties. After a brief stammering introduction, Olivia handed her small bag to him when he extened his hand to do so, and they walked to the apartment in quiet midwestern conversation. "I do miss snow," he told her. "Hawaii doesn't have much of it as you can imagine, but I did hear that one of the islands, a volcano or somthing on it, gets so much snow you can ski on it, no kidding. At least that's what I heard, of course I don't ski anyway, but a good snowball fight would be fun, a snowman, hell, Christmas! How can you have Christsmas without snow!"
Olivia was laughing now, not at but with this young boy-man proletarian punk with shaggy hair, tan face and blue eyes. Not bad she thought, but it was his voice with little infectious Canadian inflections he had picked up from living across the river from Windsor most of his life. Things like "Eh?" "Mao-n-ton" for mountain, and that sort of thing. "Ever been to Duluth?" she asked. "Nope, can't say as I have, but would love to someday. See the lake and the trees again, and snow. Yes, snow," she laughed outloud this time. "Plenty of that up there, oh yeah, plenty of it. Maybe we can go there someday and I can show you my home, or what was my home, and my school too." Her minds eye was drifting out to sea back to the safety of the shore that was home in Duluth...then was riptided back to Hollywood...shore fading in the distant until it was swallowed by the horizon.
\par When Mike brought Olivia home with him, Dutchess beamed a smile as long and groping as the beacon of a Lake Superior lighthouse reaching out to sea. Olivia was adrift at sea, and Dutchess went down to the sea, and liked what she saw. An innocence she used to have, but had lost was now alive and well in this young girl. She welcomed her with open arms, protective, and Olivia was now part of the Dutchess solar system too. Over the course of the next 8 months, Mike and Olivia sold grass and acid for Dutchess on the streets and covered their share of expenses along with the sex they both provided her with as a bonus. Tommie and Ray hung out for parties and brought friends along, for the music, the conversation, the wine, beer and drugs. Mike had to admit, they were insane...good friends by now, but enjoyably insane, like being ringside at the circus, or actors in a back alley Ed Wood, Jr. movie. Olivia had moved in that first night with Mike and Dutchess. and both girls would turn the other way if Mike decided to spend the night with the other one, not blatant, not in your face, but silently acknowledged. Turns out when Mike was off somewhere, Dutchess and Olivia spent their own sort of quality time together, so all's fair in love and war on the Sunset Strip. Therese and Isabel got nothin' on them....
Tommie and Ray and the others were always around and when Mike needed to escape ala Ali Baba, he spent time with them on the streets. Recharging his batteries on boys night out. Tommie and Ray were a couple of badly disguised bi-guys, and although Mike didn't quite understand how these two could hustle queers and go to bed with them and not give it a second thought while banging a fresh bopper with all the right female parts, he was a loyal friend anyway, and the three of them were the Three Musketeers. Then one night, high on speed and wine, they talked Mike into fishing. "Yeah, it's like going after bass, Mike. You cast out, wiggle your worm as bait, and when they bite, yank 'em in, fast, hard until you land 'em. Then you clean and cook 'em up, with lemon and butter, oh, and lots o' lots o' pepper," Ray explained. Fish? Yes, but fishing for homo's? "See, it's simple. They all know me and Tommie, but we're willing to cut you in on the deal, and here's the deal. Ya'll just get out there as a sort of bait. We then come into the picture, especially if they're new, or we're new to them and we make a date. That way three of them shows up at one of their places, we show up, then beat the crap out of them and rob 'em. Whoooee..who the fuck they gonna tell? The cops? Fuck no!" Ray made it sound as simple as inventing the wheel. "I dunno. Sounds weird to me. Besides, do you have to beat them up? I mean if they ain't gonna say anything anyway as you say, why do that shit. Doesn't make sense. Nope, no sense at all."