Spirit in Flesh at Trinity College

I went to see the community’s band, Spirit in Flesh, at a concert at Trinity College.

The audience, consisting mostly of commune members, had a distinct aura about

them. iIt was more than a rustic, hippy look.   They were wildly enthusiastic and

seemed frighteningly involved with each other.  Several times people caught my eye

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and didn’t look away until I did. A boy with dark ethnic features, Dave, asked me to

dance.  After one dance he told me he felt like we were already friends.  For the rest

of the concert we walked around the hall, hand in hand and my lonely heart, like a

fist, began unclenching.  The air was charged.  The Band played:   “I’ve got the

weight of the world on my shoulders.  I’ve got to help it cause it’s my home.”  And,

“The meek shall inherit the earth.  We who were last shall be first”.....And, “There

exists a fine line between a man called crazy and a man that’s sane.  And we’re

walking right on down that line.”  And I  wondered if walking down that line was good,

especially for people already walking a tightrope, like me.  

The lead singer had a powerful stage presence. He was awkward; almost spastic,

like Joe Cocker, and he couldn’t dance.  I found myself riveted by his dramatic,

sudden movements, though. He seemed heroic, rather like Jim Morrison.

I was moved by the fact that there were so many kids and they all lived together.  I

thought enviously that because there were so many of them, what a difference they

must feel from the isolation that I usually felt.  I didn’t know that a person could be

even more isolated in a group, at least not in one where people tried to love each

other.

Ripping

I was almost finished embroidering a brilliant starburst upon a muslin skirt. Suddenly I

found myself ripping it up due to a snag in the fabric.

The fits came regularly after that.  They began with an initial wobbly feeling rather like

getting drunk. Between the fits were incredible feelings of transcendence and clarity. I

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could sense things about people and tell them what their secrets were.  Next,

however, I was pinching myself, hurting myself, swearing at myself.  At those times I

became afraid I was possessed. I was read Khalil Gibran when I couldn’t understand

what was happening to me.  I start skipping school and riding instead on my bike to

the transcendental meditation center in Hartford, where I learn to meditate.  It feel

good, a way out of the drama.

~

Rats in the walls

The weeks dragged by and I stayed in my room a lot. I prayed, although I was unsure

of to who or what.  My father went back into the hospital. I cooked my own food and

made my own clothes when I had money,  which was rare.  I went to school a little

more than half the time and rode my bike to parks and to the reservoir where I sat by

the water and sobbed into the mossy earth.

My life was in chaos.

I kept dreaming of rats.  Rats in the basement and behind the walls.   I was suicidal.  

My life was calling me.  “GET UP! GO OUT- DO SOMETHING!” I couldn’t get

dressed.  I saw no future.   Just rats invading and eating away at my home.

I went from the bed to the bathroom and back to bed, trying to forget the panic that

invaded me. I couldn’t sleep.  I would go in between.  Restlessness tortured me.  I

cried into my pillow.

In my bedroom on a morning in early spring, the rust colored Indian print curtains

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flapped lightly in the breeze.  I felt a presence enter, some promise of warmer days.

Something told me that if I would hang on until after graduation I would find people I

could trust.

When he returned he was no longer liberated.  The suffering in his sinking eyes

frightened me to the bone. I sensed death around him like a dark grey cloud.  He

seemed like a disembodied spirit wandering lost in total darkness. As his health

deteriorated he broke all of his liberated promises to me about trusting me and letting

me do what I wanted.  He tightened curfews and pleaded with, cried, swore at,

threatened and blamed me for not staying home.  Our talks quickly escalated into a

screaming match—actually, it was me screaming and crying, “I hate you!”  with him,

hoarsely cursing me for being selfish.   When it became clear that I would not obey,

he stopped speaking to me altogether.

By Thanksgiving he had to return to the hospital for more treatment. This time there

was a fatal problem:  A stitch came loose and dumped poisons into his system. Lying

exhausted in his hospital bed he turned to my , “You’ll be all right, won’t you?”  He

asked.  She had no idea what to tell him.  An image might have come to her of a

courageous comrade who urges the wounded soldier to hold on to his life. Or maybe

she just said what she thought was right: “No!” Death however, would have been the

most compassionate option.        He came home in the winter but his spirit was gone. 

He was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. There was such deep fear and suffering in

his sinking eyes that it frightened me to the bone. 

I was gone all the time after he came home out tripping my brains out and having a

wild time, burning myself out, forgetting, trying to forget, remembering, then forgetting

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again. I came home briefly and that was when Mom begged me to see him.  He’d

gone back in, this time to die, and I hesitantly acquiesced to Mom’s pleading and

went to see him before, as she put it, “it was too late.” I was numb partially from my

lifestyle but also because I knew it already was unsalvageable, the relationships, too

much had happened, to both of us, he was dying and I was killing myself trying to

live. She wanted me to make up with him for my running away, but he’d been running

away from me ever since he’d caught me half-undressed.

~

Leaving Home/Uncle Sam 

Come hear Uncle John’s band by the riverside, come on along or go alone, he’s come to take his

children home.  -Grateful Dead

One morning in May I meandered spacily up the driveway after an illicit night of

partying with some older boys at Yale.  My uncle’s car was in the driveway and he

got out of the car and started walking toward me with a pained look on his face.  He

nervously restocked his shirt into his pants. Something was definitely up.  “Hi Laura.” 

He said cautiously, “...Don’t go in there.”

One morning I returned home from an illicit overnight at Yale and found myself

locked out. My uncle’s car was waiting for me in the driveway, and the plan was that

he would whisk me away to live at his house. I never “got it” that I would actually be

living there, only that my nice uncle was giving me a ride out of Hell. When I “came

to” and noticed my new situation, I soon felt betrayed: unable to bear the

disapproving looks my aunt gave me, I phoned my friend, Joelle, from my aunt and

uncle’s house. Her parents declined to rescue me: “If her parents don’t want her, we

don’t either.” I learned that when you are a bad-girl, there is no less compassionate

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place than your hometown. 

I looked at him uneasily.

“Your mother has decided that it would be best if you don’t live here anymore.”   His

eyebrows furled.  He was pained but resolved. “I’ve got your things. You can stay

with us.”

I felt that my folks meant business because they’d gotten my uncle to tell me.  That’s

what people did when they were really through with each other; they got someone

else to tell them.

I’d like to think now, that my kind and generous uncle had been coerced into

believing that he would be the safest person to deliver such a verdict.  I was

suspended between horror and relief, a person suddenly released from prison but

with no where that was sure to be better. In the car on the way to Sam’s house I

thought about how strange it was that a few days before I had gotten picked up when

I was hitching, from a guy named Goldie. Goldie was a big cleaned-up, biker looking

boy, with a pony-tale and a gold Star of David on his shirt.  He was a raw mix of

contradictions; a rebel from Yale.

I’d bragged that I was going to get kicked out of my house soon, not believing the

words I spoke.  He had sighed, “Well, babe, if you ever need any help I can put you

up in an extra space down at the Voice.” Hartford’s Other Voice was an underground

newspaper.  He sounded reassuring, like a generous older guy who knew the ropes.  

I didn’t expect to see him again.  At Sam’s house my grandfather wouldn’t look at me

and my aunt spoke to me in such a resentful tone that I felt as if I had bugs crawling

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on my skin. I could feel their unspoken hostility, like a thick smog in the air and it

made me weak. It wasn’t long before I left there without an explanation and hitch-

hiked to Hartford’s Other Voice.  An ugly building in downtown  housed the

newspaper office and a big garage.  Upstairs was a health food store.

When I arrived I went into the store.  I was hungry and tired and feebly attempted to

chat with the person at the cash register, while eyeing a granola bar.  I was too sick

at heart and confused to know what to do in order to get food. The kind woman

picked up on it and offered to let me work the register for an hour, in exchange for

some food.

I went downstairs and Goldie showed me to a partitioned off section of the cement

floor in the corner of the big garage.  The only thing that distinguished it as a

bedroom was a mattress on the floor. I was beat and soon fell asleep with my clothes

on.

Later I was awoken by someone climbing into bed with me.  I was startled and

frightened.  “Shh- it’s only me-Goldie.”  He put his arms around me.  “What are you

doing here?” I asked.  “This is my bed.” he retorted with surprise, as if we’d had a

preemptory agreement.  I panicked silently.  “This is good,” he said as he forced a

hug on me and I squirmed, backing against the wall.  “No, no, this is good.” he

repeated, his fat fingers working fast at pulling off my clothes.  There was no point in

trying to get away.  His weight, now upon me was overbearing.  Besides, I had

nowhere to go.  I mentally checked out, thinking, Let’s get this over with!  I was on an

emotional roller-coaster,  open to extremes, both dangerous and mystical.  That

mysterious undertow of the late sixties dragged me down beyond depression and

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into despair, and then tossed me higher and higher. I would  crash down again

harder, and  try to pulling together fragments of my former self as it sucked me under

again. 

Electric Cool Aid Acid Test at Milton Boys School

The next morning I walked out of Goldy’s den and into the bus garage to find two

airbrushed psychedelic buses filled with happy youths.   One bus was called, “Just

Bus,” and had a huge red dragon on the side.  The other was the Rainbow bus, with

a rainbow on one side and a sun on the other. I stepped into the Sunshine Bus and

was greeted with smiles and a joint.  Goldie walked over to the bus to find me.  He

pretended to be very concerned for my welfare.  In the safety of this group I informed

him that I wouldn’t be back. “O.K.!”  he said, nearly crying “if you don’t want to be my

woman than screw you!”  I felt avenged.

The Beatles were singing, “Somebody spoke and I slipped into a dream” and I must

have gone into a dream myself, because although I now recall a twelve hour ride

through a long dark night, we actually arrived in the middle of the day at the Milford

School for Boys.  The drivers parked the buses on the rolling green hills on the

outskirts of the school and a third bus, which I later learned was from Yale, soon met

us.  It contained all of the props for a multi-media extravaganza: colored parachutes,

tents, cameras, projectors, slides, colored oils and more.   An elaborate speaker

system was hooked up and placed on top of the busses and the boys poured out of

the school, lured by the outpourings of Grateful Dead.  The Dead promised me

someone would be there:  “Come hear Uncle John’s Band by the riverside, come on

along or go alone, he’s come to take his children home....” Someone in  the bus

started pouring out small paper cups full of organic mescaline-laced kool- aid and

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handing them out to the curious boys who were trickling out, from the school.   A cup

was held before me.  “Drink it!  It’s good for your head,”  the person at the end of the

arm said.  Obediently, I drank it.  

Then I wandered alone into a field of clover, blue-eyed grasses and Timothey. I

began feeling weirder and weirder. A question formed in my mind, “Who am I?” I tried

reason:  Let’s see...Yesterday I had been a high school student.  I had lived with my

parents at thirty-two Clifton Avenue in West Hartford, Connecticut.  Good.  Another

thought loomed before me, “Who  lived?”  

My head began to dissolve.  Thoughts began thinking me; feelings began feeling me. 

Instead of breathing, I was being breathed.

I got some paper somehow and began to draw.  Then I heard a strangely familiar

voice very close to me saying,   “I like what you’re drawing.”  He was looking over my

shoulder.  I turned to see a boy my own size, dark and small like me who I felt was

from some common lost tribe; a kindred soul.  “Oh, thank God,” I said. He smiled. 

“What are you drawing?” “Cartoons....” I answered.  “ I’ve never tripped.” We were

suddenly in a cartoon ourselves.  Pages of the cartoon flipped.  The scene kept

switching very fast and soon we were holding hands and running through a field to

the music of the Grateful Dead. “... got some things to talk about here beside the

rising tide.” My eyes were closed and my arms outstretched, and as we ran, other

people reached out and joined hands until a long line of people were running through

the field together.  I flew on my feet. Love was in control and Grateful Dead were

faithful messengers, guaranteeing a good time for all; not just some.  The media crew

inflated an eyeball-shaped tent that ingeniously is held aloft by blown-in air.  The front

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of the eyeball served as a screen upon which colored oils are projected.  They oozed

sensually across the screen like huge amoebas.

Outside the tent, people held up the edges of enormous colored parachutes upon

people were bounced high up into the air, trampoline-style.  Up out of my body I was

launched, and I floated back down like a feather into silk and paisleys and laughter

and color, and then above it all into a sea of all bubbling effervescence. 

Gary and I ran up into a tree and I was smiling so hard that I became the Cheshire

cat.  Down below someone said, “I’m scared.”  Scared?  We exchanged puzzled

looks.   Fear was something we’d forgotten about,  a movie with all of the color

drained out.  But everyone in this  movie was in color.  Gary was wedged up in the

branches with me, we were holding hands .  He became an attentive newspaper

reporter interviewing me.  I was God and in the next moment he was God.  

Everything was as it should be.  Eventually, maybe in a moment or in a lifetime, the

whole world would awaken to goodness.   

Crosby Stills and Nash sang, “You, who are on the road must have a code that you

can live by .....and so become yourself, because the past is just a Goodbye...  Teach

your parents well....Your father’s hell will slowly go by...”.

Yin-Yang, Hieroglyphics and ancient Egyptian symbols swam before my eyes.

The day grew quiet and shadows became long.  I fascinated Gary.  I told him I had

no  home and he told me about a log cabin  up in Vermont where I could stay with

him and his friend in a couple of weeks.  I wanted to finish high school and I had a

month to go.  I would find a place to stay in the meantime.  He promised to  visit me. 

I went back to Other Voice and slept on the bus.

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I hitched to high school.   The fear that used to knot my stomach when I had entered

this tense milieu in the past was gone.