Memoirs of a Flower Child - George S Geisinger (the best books to read txt) 📗

both searched the city endlessly looking for my buddy and me. They arrived together, in separate cars all at once, and we spent the night in their hideaway couch-bed, next the guy I'd hitchhiked down with, realizing I was behaving quite thoroughly like some fool in love.
After breakfast the next morning, which I felt was an enormously rude imposition on their hospitality, we were returned to the same truck route where we'd arrived, by her father, who only kept his thoughts to himself about this wild boy and his wild shenanigans over his only daughter, to hitchhike back up north with that same buddy, who had stolen at least one girlfriend from me in the past. I have no idea why I wanted that guy to meet Mary Lynn, of all people. It was only that I wasn't thinking clearly.
My poor dear mother suffered God only knows how much anxiety over the brief note I'd left her in the middle of the night on the kitchen counter at home before leaving.
Finally back on campus, the poor girl finally agreed to go for a pizza and a show, and we went to a cozy little pizza cellar off campus, with rustic furniture and sumptuous pizza, where I learned the meaning of the word “munchies,” and off we went to the 75 cent movies up on the main drag of the little university town in the picturesque mountains, of the late fall season, being young and happy forever and ever, amen.
But that wasn't the whole story of the evening.
There was a pot seller who'd been after me to smoke a joint with him ever since the beginning of the semester, and when Mary Lynn had agreed to a “date,” and had disappeared in the direction of her dorm to prepare herself, old Charley showed up out on campus, and helped me celebrate this novel turn of events, that the girl of my dreams was about to go out with me – with me, mind you – to get a pizza and a show within the hour! To celebrate, or to suit Charley, I'm not certain which, I concented to smoke his joint with him.
Now, I'd never smoked pot before, and I was in a terrible fix after we smoked two joints off one quarter of the crowded quad on that busy Friday afternoon, smoking away while I worried about getting arrested, knowingly breaking the law right out there in public where anyone could have been watching. But there turned out to be no issue with the Police that day. I noticed, to my stoned consternation, that time slowed down to a standstill under the influence of that stuff.
I had never realized that reefer could effect a person's perspective on the passage of time. Not only that, but my thoughts were thoroughly befuddled otherwise, and when I showed up at the girl's dorm and called her to come downstairs over the intercom, I was too stoned to feel competent to handle anything, much less this first, very personally significant date, while I was just then initiating my own drug problem, ultimately sewing the first seeds of the total ruin of the one relationship I was so anxious to be beginning in my life with this really nice young lady, as well as undermining my very important plans for my future in general, by the one act of giving in to Charley, the pusher, as I had so easily justified myself in doing.
The way the whole ordeal ended up for that one evening was good enough for the moment, but the overall damage to my future turned out to be devastating.
The food and movie were enough to use up all my inebriation by the time we were walking back to Mary Lynn's dorm, and back at her dorm lobby, I told her I thought she was really neat, and she nearly knocked me down rushing into my arms to kiss me goodnight, with some of the unutterable passion between us, knocking my coat from my shoulder to the floor in the process.
I was ecstatic about the evening's events, as I was unaware of the ground I must have covered walking home to my own dorm, caught up in the revery of my glory, that I knew nothing of walking the whole way across campus to my own dorm, thinking things over in an enraptured and distracted state, head over heels for the little piano player who had obviously fallen for the likes of me!
The very idea that I'd been badgered into taking drugs, and the very idea of the fact that that would eventually be the downfall of a significant relationship and the downfall of a significant career was a reality that I avoided considering while the strength of my youth suspended the illusion that both possibilities continued to be avoidable, for about another two years after that.
Well, none of the drug pushing on the part of so many sinister people, learning my vulnerability from the one to the next, none of it was fair to either me or Mary Lynn, and we both paid a dear price over the long run. Eventually I got the opportunity to turn old Charley in to the authorities, and I did do just exactly and precisely that. Old Charley spent a year in jail for trafficking drugs on that university campus, and I ended up with a major nervous breakdown and debilitating disability for a lifetime.
Charley was put out with me, returning to campus a year later, but I think he got the better end of the deal. He got his come-up-in's all at once. I'm still dealing with mine a lifetime later.
My bad turn of health forced me into a long series of hospitalizations and I found myself monumentally inept and demoralized for my entire youth thereafter. I broke off with Mary Lynn after about two years. I'd been in a hospital, and had gone back to campus to try the course work again. At least, that was the rationale I used on my mother, to get the funding to return to the campus to try to win the girl back after I'd gotten so sick so badly.
I ended up breaking off with Mary Lynn, after winning her affection again, which had been my object in going back to campus in the first place. I really wanted to marry her desperately, and keep her in my life forever, and I never did earn any music degree or teaching certificate, or find any way to adequately support myself, much less a wife and family.
She married a friend of her brother's from the Navy, and gave him two daughters. I talked to one of her daughters on the long distance phone one time, and she sounded like she'd heard of me. But her husband objected to my calling, and I desisted, being a man of honor, as I am.
Now I'm an old bachelor, always lonely for the one girl who has become probably the one most unreal of all my memories I have ever had, in the very confused, distressed old thinker of mine.

Gazebo
Chapter 7

I OD'd on some kind of hallucination the year I was 20, maybe it was mescaline, I don't know. It was just before my 21st birthday. OD is not what Timothy Leary or Carlos Castaneda would call It, but the term is good enough for me. I never could figure out quite how to tell this story, but I need to keep trying. It's unusual enough as a story to warrant the ongoing attempt.
It was January, I guess, and as cold as Greenland. I'd been walking around the university campus, where I was supposed to be studying music education, tripping my brains out on something or other that a buddy of mine had turned me on to. He called it chocolate mescaline. I'd been tripping for some unknown amount of time, trying to find the two-legged.
I eventually showed up at the campus chaplain's office claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ. I eventually showed up at the Office of the Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts confessing to extensive drug abuse, ever since I'd been on campus. That sure was going to facilitate me qualifying for a teaching certificate. By the time the campus psychologists got a hold of me, I was convinced I was an old Native American by the name of Shadow that Comes Inside, and that I was 2,500 Years of the Sun, whatever that means.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
My buddy and I dropped this “chocolate” pill that he cut in half so we could both have some, whatever it was, and we were up in the mountains tripping. I saw the most unusual creature on the mountain. It scared me half to death. Then it disappeared into thin air. It must have been that Mescalito guy Carlos Castaneda writes about. I'd said something to my buddy when I saw it, but he said he hadn't seen the thing. I've never seen a creature like it, before or since. After hitchhiking back to campus, my buddy went his way and I went mine, and then the trip really got underway.
I transcended food and sleep.
All the language of the four legged and the wood was uniquely understandable to me for the first time in my lifetime, as was the language of the wind talking to the tall grasses. The language of the waters talking to the stones in the streams made perfect sense to me. Waters always leaving, but never gone. Wind always leaving, but never gone.
It was all like poetry, some kind of wonderful verse. I understood all of it for the very first time.
But the two-legged were not available to be seen for the longest time, wherever they went. There were only the natural things to be seen and talked with. Other than that, there was only snow and the mountains to walk in. The spirits of all the natural things showed themselves to me, and I could see the inner strength of all of them, while they spoke their poetry in my hearing.
I was not cold for the longest time. I wandered to and fro, not knowing what had happened to me, and after a long time, the two-legged found me. I did not find them. They were simply there along with the natural things.
That was confusing.
The trees had said, “He thinks we're so wonderful, but our feet are buried deep in the ground, and we can't go anywhere. We're at everybody's mercy, standing here in one spot all our lives, drinking the rain water and eating the nutrients from the ground. But he can do so much more.”
The Bambi said, “Yes, and he thinks we're wonderful too, but he has hands to do things with, and all we have is hooves. He thinks we're wonderful because we can eat the tall grasses, but he can do so much more. We have to dash across the man-made stone, which goes on forever across the land. We run for our lives to avoid getting hit by the suicide machines the two-legged go in, to get to the places they rush to, wherever those places are. We risk our lives just to get ourselves a drink of water, where the waters talk to the stones. Some two-legged even try to kill us in the woods, with their long arm that barks so