I was summoned awake that wintry morning by Lenin's ghost standing in the snow tap-tap-tapping on my dorm window. Recognition came slowly as I scraped the ambered residue from my eyes and waited for the fog to dissipate.
"Sinbad?," I croaked.
"Call me Puff," chirped the apparition.
It was the year of Woodstock, the Lunar Landing and the Miracle Mets. We blasted Pink Floyd on our stereos while we smoked pot in the basement. Weekends, we rode the "F" train into the city and dropped acid in Central Park. We read Zap Comix and watched Easy Rider. It was two years after the Summer of Love.
Frank and I were best friends, me chubby and sarcastic with my unkempt mop of shoulder length hair, Frank taller and lankier, sporting a Nimbus of tight brown curls in a style known as a Jew-fro. We had just graduated from Forest Hills High, and our sap was rising like spring maples. We were flush with cash from our after school jobs. I had bought a brand new Martin guitar on which I could pluck the entire Beatles' White Album from memory. Life was sweet, but for the soul-sucking angst in the pits of our stomachs that tugged and burned...
The Sexual Revolution that was a front-page story everywhere else in the world had passed over our middle-class backwater like the Angel of Death. The girls languished in an alternate universe where young women wore too much Maybelline and ironed their hair. The heels of their go-go boots reverberated up and down the hallowed halls as they popped their gum seductively. Their drug of choice was Clearasil. Though we had hit several singles and even legged out the occasional double, Frank and I were Not Yet Men.
We were enrolled at SUNY New Paltz the next spring, and were loath to be the last kids on our block. Embarrassingly, except for summer camp, neither Frank nor I had ever slept away from home nor been anywhere west of New Jersey. This sad state of affairs was an unacceptable affront to our adolescent amour propre. Something needed to be done.
Like many young men of our generation, our second Bible was On the Road by Jack Kerouac, our fictional guru, that Yoda of the road-a, Dean Moriarty. Unlike most young men, however, we decided to actually follow in his thumbsteps and hitchhike cross country, returning home covered in glory and redolent with Life and Experience. We pooled our pennies and bought matching backpacks and sleeping bags from Canal Surplus as we plotted our exit strategy.
One mid-July morning at the crack of dawn, we made our way to the Grand Central Parkway and stuck out our thumbs, no longer two teens from Queens desperate to cross home plate, but God-mad poets in The Great American Night. Our destination: that Day-Glo mecca of free love, San Francisco.
We lucked out the first day. As soon as we crossed the George Washington Bridge, we caught a ride from a retired trucker who slugged straight gin from a pint bottle while he told us how he had lost an eye in an accident. He took us as far as the outskirts of Pittsburgh, where we set up camp under a highway bridge.. We had covered over 400 miles and were proud as peacocks. We were Dean Moriarty, James Dean, and Dean Martin. The Dream Team of Infinite Cool. The cicadas and I serenaded each other as the trucks rolled over our heads. We ate bologna sandwiches, rolled out our sleeping bags and went to sleep, content in the expectation that our passage west would continue with the same smooth insouciance as it had begun
The Road proved herself a Harsh Mistress the next afternoon, however, when we only got as far as Columbus, Ohio. While hitchhiking on I-40 in a hundred plus degree heat, we were detained by a silent gargantuan Highway Patrolman wearing a huge brown Smokey the Bear hat and a name tag that identified him, astonishingly, as Elmer Gantry.
We meekly accompanied Mr. Gantry into his patrol car to the local cop shop where my friend and I were separated. Frank, being 18 years old, was taken away to be processed, while I, at my tender age of 17, was led to a starkly furnished room reserved for juvenile offenders. I was greeted by the "Juvie" detective, a full-blooded native Hawaiian who insisted I call him "Big Daddy." His jolly demeanor and ill-fitting pork pie hat belied the seriousness of the short-barreled .38 which hung from a shoulder holster on his rumpled white shirt .Unless I called my mother, Big Daddy chuckled, I would be sent home and Frank would be charged with corrupting the morals of a minor, and possibly jailed.
“Dean Moriarty never had to call his mother,” I wanted to protest, but I knew it would do no good. Mom was called and after some back-and-forth with Big Daddy, surprisingly ruled that I would be allowed to continue on my pilgrimage if I agreed to keep my thumbs in my jeans where they belonged and catch the next bus out of town. Only thus would Frank remain a free man, and my morals, such as they were, remain uncorrupted. The dream, though wounded, lived on.
Elmer’s big Brother drove us to the seedy downtown Greyhound terminal, ("leave the driving to us, Gus") where Frank and I purchased our tickets. After waiting several hours, we climbed aboard a great belching behemoth that smelled like feet and waddled westward ho. After an eternity of flashing neon and overlit truck stops serving tuna on white, our chariot finally arrived at San Francisco's Skid Row bus terminal on Mission Street. California dreamin' had become a reality.
Flash forward. Charles Manson redefined the Love Generation with a little help from his friends. Our nation's misadventures in Southeast Asia were six weeks older, if not wiser. On the homefront, however, the news couldn't be better. The Dream Team celebrated Life and Music at Big Sur. We made fast friends with fellow travelers from Mendocino to Monterey. Frank's Uncle Julius treated us to a glorious week swimming and water skiing in the frigid water of Lake Tahoe.
I had grown harder and leaner. Frank's voice had deepened. The scraggly wisps I cultivated on my teenaged chin thickened into a serviceable goatee. I learned a few more songs on my guitar, and best of all, one starry night around a campfire at Wheeler's Ranch, the Dream Team connected with two barefoot girls from Teaneck, and under the bright Sonoma moon, we graduated for the second time that year, with honors.
Mission accomplished, we gravitated back to the San Francisco Area, this time to that modern-day Athens of the West on the East Bay, Berkeley. The girls wore cutoff jeans and painted flowers on their faces. Their ankle bracelets and necklaces jingled with every step they took. They smiled wide-eyed at everyone and their favorite expressions were "far out" or "oh wow." Jefferson Airplane or Country Joe and the Fish entertained the masses every weekend in People's Park. We spent our days in drug-induced dissolution and our nights, blowin' in the wind. Berkeley was our heaven on earth, a kaleidoscope of innocent corruption, where boys and girls passed each other around like trays of cakes.
We had at first camped out for several nights, along with several of our new friends, on the roof of a garden apartment building until one of our group, high on more than mere life, jumped off the roof four stories down into the swimming pool. The cops came and we had to find other accommodations.
Frank and I located our new digs the next day in typical Berkeley fashion ("do you know a place to crash, man?") We made our way to a run-down clapboard house just over the city line in Oakland named "the dinosaur pad" in honor of the brightly painted papier-mâché brontosaurus with half a tail that stood guard on the front lawn.
I knocked at the door, and receiving no reply, Frank and I let ourselves in. "Can we crash here?" I asked nobody in particular. "I suppose so," replied a horse-faced fellow several years older than us dressed in shabby denim overalls and no shirt. He introduced himself as John, and having appropriated the only usable chair in the house, he never got up, a king on his throne.
Later that night, the denizens of the dinosaur pad, about 20 of us, boys and girls together, shared dinner, mainly cold cuts "liberated" from the local supermarket, followed by jugs of cheap Napa red and other digéstifs. We solved the world's ills far into the night While my Guitar Gently Weeped.
I was distracted from the summit by the clattering of what sounded like a model train emanating from the back porch. I staggered over to investigate and came face-to-face for the first time with a stocky blue-eyed Bolshevik busy at an antique Singer, intently sewing new sleeves onto an old shirt. He was dressed head to toe in military drab, brightened only by a vivid red star sewn onto the peak of his army cap, a row of dime store medals across his chest declaring him a Hero of the Revolution, and an improbable pair of purple puffy sleeves directly out of an Elizabethan costume drama. He called himself Sinbad and he claimed to be a 22 year-old deserter from the Marine Corps from Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The next day, Frank and I set up camp in our usual spot on Telegraph Avenue where we played bluegrass with my guitar case open to receive contributions from our adoring public. I strummed my guitar while Henry from Tulsa plucked his banjo, accompanied by Frank who kept time with a tambourine.
We ran into our new friend, Sinbad who survived by selling beautiful ornate roach clips which he fashioned from coat hangers using a pair of needle nose pliers he kept in his kit bag. His hands were extraordinarily agile and he could crank out ten or more of these beauties in an hour. We invited him to set up next to us, and he arrayed his wares neatly on a blanket along with a copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.
As we got to know him better, Sinbad revealed himself to be a passionate fellow. He was obsessed with long-haired girls, abundant in that part of the world. They were his "bopper domes" and he would often sneak up on them and caress their hair, while whispering sweet nothings into their ear. He addressed them all as "my dear." Although startled, the amiable acid queens out West would usually smile at Sinbad and walk on.
Sinbad was equally obsessed with his puffy shirts, of which he had a seemingly limitless supply. He called his shirts his "puffs."
He would often croon "long silky bopper domes, yuffy-puffy sleeves, "over and over while stroking either a real or imaginary head of hair. This bizarre litany would be followed by a demented high-pitched giggle that resembled more than anything a heliated porpoise. Amazingly, in that time and place this passed for normal behavior, and we found it amusing.
He was also possessed by a certain revolutionary zeal, and would often rail at great length against "the man" in general and Vice President Spiro Agnew in particular. He would answer any argument by quoting from his ever-present book of Mao's quotations, which he had seemingly memorized. This was also considered normal back then, and it didn't dampen our friendship one bit, and we even ended up sharing a cheap apartment after the real owners showed up and took possession of the dinosaur pad.
At last, our Summer of Love came to a close and it became time to return home, this time by air.
Before we parted company for what we thought to be the final time, Frank and I invited Sinbad to come visit us when we went off to college the following year. It was the same invitation we had extended to half the lowlife in the Bay area. Little did we know...
It was February of the following year. Kent State and Altamont removed the last shine from that grand experiment that was the 1960s. Peace and love were dead as dodos. Cops were now "pigs." Revolution was in the air.
I had just spent six miserable months living at home and sorting punch cards for the Department of Hospitals. Frank and I had begun college a month earlier at SUNY New Paltz. Upstate New York was especially cold that winter.
When Sinbad appeared at my window in his kinder, gentler incarnation as Puff, we were somewhat at a loss as to what to do with him. However, fortune smiled on him when my roommate moved off campus with his lover, leaving me with my room all to myself, spare bed and all. I invited Puff to move in, while the infinitely sensible Frank knowingly rolled his eyes.
Puff was far from the ideal roommate. He would sit on his bed stark naked, having grown fat from the roast beef sandwiches I smuggled out of the cafeteria to provide his sustenance. It was obvious that he had not seen the age of twenty two in decades and the image of him crawling through a rice paddy was quite ludicrous.
On the rare occasions when I tried to study, my concentration, such as it was, would be broken by his mad incantations ("long silky bopper domes, yuffy-puffy sleeves, long silky bopper domes yuffy-puffy sleeves, I love to pet them, pet them, pet them, giggle giggle"). He would spend hours scratching his military-issue K-bar on a sharpening stone, while muttering dark oaths against "the big pigs." Once in a moment of weakness I trusted him to pierce my ear with one of his enormous sewing needles, making me bleed like Caesar on the Senate floor.
Another time, Puff unbeknownst to me, appropriated my brand new electric blue dress shirt and in gratitude for my hospitality, replaced the sleeves with bright red "puffs." "Bright puffs!" he twittered, presenting them to me proudly. I actually thought they looked kind cool and wore them often. It wasn't until much later I found out my friends called me "Mary Queen of Scots" behind my back.
Puff's act also did not play well among the brittle intellectual “womyn” back East. They wore glasses although they had perfect vision and read Germaine Greer. They wanted to live like Betty Freidan and die like Anais Nin. They were infected with a grim, inconvenient strain of feminism and didn't appreciate being mauled like Golden Retrievers.
It came as no surprise, therefore, when his way with the ladies that had served him so well out West, landed Puff in jail one weekend when he bopped the wrong dome.
Finally, the campus police, or "pigs" as they were called, were forced to respond to the numerous complaints lodged against poor Puff and evicted him, in handcuffs, from campus. He soon found refuge in the back of the local health food restaurant where he cleaned up and washed dishes in exchange for soy burgers and steamed veggies.
Although glad to have my room back to myself, I missed old Puff in a strange kind of way. Frank and I understood him better than anybody back East, probably because we had seen him flourish in his natural habitat, where his madness could breathe free. He was a rare creature, an anomaly of nature who could survive but not really adapt. He was a far better friend than roommate, and we visited him often.
At last the school term came to an end. My parents came to pick me up while Puff was hanging out in my room to keep me company. We crammed my possessions into every available inch of the family Buick while Puff had packed all his worldly goods into one small canvas knapsack. Reluctantly, my parents agreed to take him to the nearest Thruway entrance. They let me drive.
Our paths diverged for the last time as I saw Puff in my rearview mirror bravely marching down the graveled highway as if he had somewhere to go. My Bright Puffs hung in my closet for years after they no longer fit.
